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CONVERSATIONS 



ON SOME OF 



THE OLD POETS 



V ■* f . I » » ^, » 5 

- - - - - - - - . -J 

BY 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

FRED LEWIS PATTEE 

Professor of English in Pennsylvania State College 



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** Or, if I would delig-ht my private hours 
With music or w^ith poem, where, so soon 
As in our native language, can I find 
That solace ? " 

Paradise Regained 



NEW YORK 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

PUBLISHERS 

V 



THE LIBRARY Of 

CONGRESS, 
Two CorttM Received 

JUL. 24 1901 

Copyright entry 
CLASS ^ XXc N». 
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Copjrrig-ht, 1901, 
By Thomas Y. Crowell & Company. 



TO 
MY FATHER 

CHARLES LOWELL, D.D. 

WHOM, IF I HAD NOT THE 

HIGHER PRIVILEGE OF REVERING AS A PARENT 

I SHOULD STILL HAVE 

HONORED AS A MAN AND LOVED AS A FRIEND 



E^i^ Uolutne 



CONTAINING MANY OPINIONS FROM WHICH HE WILL WHOLLY, 

YET WITH THE 

LARGE CHARITY OF A CHRISTIAN HEART, DISSENT 

IS INSCRIBED BY HIS 
YOUNGEST CHILD 



*' Hail, bards of mightier grasp ! on you 
I chiefly call, the chosen few, 
Who cast not off the acknowledged guide, 
Who faltered not, nor turned aside; 
Whose lofty genius could survive 
Privation, under sorrow thrive.'* 

Wordsworth 



TO THE READER. 



A PREFACE is always either an apology or an ex- 
planation ; and a good book needs neither. That I 
write one, then, proves that I am diffident of the 
merit of this volume, to a greater degree, even, than 
an author must necessarily be. 

For the minor faults of the book the hurry with 
which it has been prepared must plead in extenua- 
tion, since it was in process of writing and printing 
at the same time, so that I could never estimate its 
proportions as a whole. This must excuse the too 
great length of the First Conversation, which I should 
have divided, had I known in time how it would have 
grown under my hands. Some repetitions may also 
occur, which I trust the candid reader will refer to 
the same exculpatory cause. 

The substance of the two other Conversations ap- 
peared more than two years ago in the *' Boston 
Miscellany," a magazine conducted by my friend, N. 
Hale, Jr., Esq. The articles, as then written, met 
with some approbation, and I had often been urged 
to reprint them by friends, with whose wishes it was 
as well my duty as my delight to comply. Yet I con- 



vi TO THE READER, 

fess I felt strongly reluctant in this matter ; and my 
reluctance increased after looking over the articles, 
and seeing how imperfect they were. 

It then occurred to me that, by throwing them 
into the form of conversations, greater freedom 
would be given them, and that discursiveness, which 
was their chief fault (among many others, of style), 
would find readier pardon. Some of the deepest, as 
well as the most delightful books, have been written 
in this form in our own language, not to speak of its 
prevalent use among the Greeks and Latins. I need 
only mention the names of Izaak Walton, Walter 
Savage Landor, and Home Tooke, to recall to mind 
three of the most prominent among many English 
examples. ^ 

I had no intention of giving them anything like a 
dramatic turn, and I trust I shall not so be censured. 
They are merely essays, divided in this way to allow 
them greater ease and frankness, and the privilege 
of wandering at will. That this license has not been 
carried to a greater degree than is w^arranted by the 
usual suggestiveness of conversation will, I trust, be 
conceded. If some of the topics introduced seem 
foreign to the subject I can only say that they are 
not so to my mind, and that an author's object in 
writing criticisms is not only to bring to light the 
beauties of the works he is considering, but also to 
express his own opinions upon those and other 
matters. 

1 Among- the pleasantest recent writings in this form, I would 
mention "The Philosophy of Mystery," by W. C. Dendy, M.D. 



TO THE READER. vii 

Wishing, as I did, to preserve, as far as possible 
unaltered, whatever had given pleasure to others in 
the articles as already written, I experienced many 
difficulties. It is impossible to weld cast-iron, and I 
had not time to melt it and recast it. 

I am not bold enough to esteem these essays of 
any great price. Standing as yet only in the outer 
porch of life, I cannot be expected to report of those 
higher mysteries which lie unrevealed in the body of 
the temple. Yet, as a child, when he has found but 
a mean pebble, which diifers from ordinary only so 
much as by a stripe of quartz or a strain of iron, calls 
his companions to behold his treasure, which to them 
also affords matter of delight and wonder ; so I can- 
not but hope that my little findings may be pleasant, 
and haply instructive to some few. 

An author^s opinions should be submitted to no 
arbitration but that of solitude and his own con- 
science ; but many defects and blemishes in his mode 
of expressing them may doubtless be saved him by 
submitting his work, before publication, to the judg- 
ment of some loving friend, — and if to the more 
refined eye of a woman, the better. But the haste 
with which these pages have been prepared and 
printed has precluded all but a very trifling portion 
of them from being judged by any eye save my own. 

Elmwood, Cambridge, Mass. 
Dec. 19, 1844. 



INTRODUCTION. 



To gain a true conception of the work of James 
Russell Lowell, one must recognize at the outset that 
he was first of all a poet. Poetry was his earliest 
passion ; it ruled his youth ; it modified his education ; 
it turned him from his logical profession, and at 
length it forced itself upon him as his life-work. 
But the American muse in the thirties and forties 
had little to bestow save laurel. Not even a life of 
celibacy could be supported by poems alone, and 
Lowell, when he was scarcely of age, was helplessly 
in love and even engaged to a maiden in every way 
worthy of a poet's dreams. Prose had a commercial 
value ; it was in demand, and perforce he turned to 
it for support. He wrote what may loosely be called 
literary criticism, but in reality it was but the appre- 
ciations of a young poet who under the elm trees 
during the long summer days had read eagerly all of 
the old poets from Theocritus to Keats. 

LowelPs first endowment, aside from his love for 
truth and beauty, was sympathy. He entered intui- 
tively into the soul of the old poets. Seldom in 
modern times have they had a more appreciative, a 
more discerning reader. His studies and apprecia- 
tions found an eager audience. It was like looking 
through a Claude Lorraine glass into the soul of the 

ix 



X INTR OD UCTION, 

old masters to read his selections and his enthusi- 
astic comments. Thus he became what for want of 
a better name we may call a critic. He wrote much ; 
his prose sketches are scattered through all the re- 
views and miscellanies of the middle period. 

As he grew older, as his outlook upon life and lit- 
erature became broader and his mastery of his art 
more perfect, his critical studies increased in breadth 
and strength, but one cannot help noting that with 
each increase in critical power there was a corre- 
sponding decrease in lyric feeling, a falling away from 
the fine poetic quality of his early work. The odes 
of his later period, magnificent as they are, have not 
the lyric intensity and the spontaneous freshness that 
we might expect after his " first fine careless rap- 
ture." No man can serve two masters ; the lyric 
muse can bide no rivals. 

The critical and appreciative faculty in Lowell grew 
with use until it approached the bounds of fastidious- 
ness, but he turned ever his most searching criticism 
upon his own work. Few writers anywhere have 
remodelled and excised their creations with more re- 
morseless care. The final edition of his works, 
arranged and edited by his own hand during his ma- 
turest years, contains a surprisingly small portion of 
his entire literary product. No trace of his earlier 
prose is to be found in this final revision ; the ** Con- 
versations on Some of the Old Poets " is omitted 
altogether ; the numerous reviews and lectures and 
contributions to periodicals are nearly all missing, 
and even the few that were deemed worthy of inclu- 



INTR OD UC TION. xi 

sion in the final edition have been so remodelled and 
pruned as often to resemble but little their earlier 
forms. The essay on " Rousseau," for instance, is 
the condensation of ^v^ or six lectures. All traces 
of early inexperience, of crudity, and of enthusiasm 
have been carefully removed. The edition is like 
Athena, who sprang in her full maturity and perfec- 
tion from the head of Zeus. 

While in many respects this is praiseworthy, in 
many other ways it is unfair and misleading. We 
cannot understand a writer in any full sense of the 
word unless we have his complete work and can study 
it in chronological order. We must be able to see 
the forces that moulded him ; we must trace the 
evolution of his art, and what in the case of Lowell 
is more important, perhaps, we must estimate his 
influence at every step upon his contemporaries and 
his age. Thus any estimate of the poet is incomplete 
and misleading, and indeed unjust to Lowell himself, 
which does not give careful attention to his first 
significant prose creation, the '* Conversations on 
Some of the Old Poets." As we read it we are ad- 
mitted into the very workshop of the young poet ; 
we study his methods and his ideals, liis conception of 
poetry and his early training. Not only this, we can 
study through it the literary condition of America 
and estimate LowelPs influence at a critical period. 

To understand fully the '' Conversations " one 
must consider that it was the work of a poet in his 
twenty-sixth year ; that it was published almost simul- 
taneously with his marriage, and that its author knew 



xii INTRODUCTION. 

far more of the old poets than of actual life. He had 
been fortunate in his choice of ancestors and of birth- 
place ; he had grown up in a scholarly and literary 
atmosphere ; books had been his earliest companions ; 
and his mother, a refined and sensitive soul, had 
breathed into him while he was yet in his cradle a 
passionate love for the old English ballads and songs. 
His essay, '* Cambridge Thirty Years Ago," tells us 
of this early environment. No wonder he became an 
eager reader of the old poets and dramatists ; no 
wonder that he haunted the alcoves of the Harvard 
library and read during all of his college course far 
more in the poets than in the prescribed studies. 
He was graduated when he was scarce twenty. Then 
for two years amid dreaming and reading he dallied 
with legal studies, and in the end he actually gained 
his degree from the Harvard Law School ; but he 
had no heart in his work ; poetry held full possession 
of him. Love furnished themes for his muse. He 
had become engaged before he was through with his 
law studies to Miss Maria White, herself a writer of 
verse and as beautiful a soul as even a young poet could 
conceive. But circumstances forbade an earlv mar- 
riage. Financial disaster had come suddenly upon 
his father, and the young dreamers were soon face to 
face with the old problem that has confronted so 
many poets and dreamers. He must fall back on his 
profession, much as he disliked it ; he entered 
the law office of C. G. Loring, of Boston, but he 
wrote more sonnets than briefs. At the end of the 
year, in 1841, he published — the fruit of his early 



INTRODUCTION, xiii 

legal practice — a volume of poems entitled, ''A 
Year's Life." In May of the next year he wrote to 
a friend, " I am determined to leave a calling which 
I hate," and accordingly he was soon associated with 
Robert Carter, as proprietor of a new literary maga- 
zine, '*The Pioneer." It died, however, a natural 
death after its third issue. America was not ready 
for it. He was now driven to his pen for support. 
He wrote voluminously ; he contributed poems and 
sketches to every periodical that would advance even 
a meagre price. In December, 1843, ^^ P^^ forth his 
second volume of poems, and one year later, in the 
opening days of 1845, ^^ issued his third volume, 
*' Conversations on Some of the Old Poets." 

The book is just what we might expect from the 
pen of a marvellously gifted young poet of twenty- 
six, who has read all of the poets, and who has de- 
liberately dedicated himself to a literary life. It is 
full of enthusiasm, full of a youth's first intoxication 
with life and love and romantic song. It is more de- 
lightful in many respects than the more mature and 
weighty messages of his later days. It is more un- 
studied, more fresh, spontaneous, inspired ; it is 
nearer to poetry, nearer to the throbbing heart of a 
man. It is like a walk on a spring morning. The 
generous young lover sees nothing but beauty and 
joy and promise. He seems to have no definite 
course ; he turns wherever the impulse of the moment 
may call him. '* The straight line," he declares, <* is 
not the line of beauty. There is an oak wood a mile 
or two hence whither I often walk, but I never make 



xiv INTRODUCTION, 

for it with the straightforward pertinacity of a turn- 
pike. A clump of goldenrods or a sprig of succory 
is enough to draw me aside, and when I reach my 
oaks I bring them a heart more open and a keener 
sympathy. Once there I am not locked up in them, 
but seek out glimpses of landscape on every side." 

This is a true statement of Lowell's critical 
method. The book touches upon every phase of 
English poetry. Lingering longest in the spring- 
time periods, the poet dwells delightfully on Chaucer, 
Shakspeare, and Chapman ; on Keats, Burns, and 
Wordsworth. A word or a hint turns his course. 
He characterizes with marvellous conciseness Milton, 
Marvell, Jeremy Taylor, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Leigh 
Hunt, Tennyson — in fact, all of the poets who had 
delighted him. He analyzes with insight the classi- 
cal school, the Queen Anne writers, the Puritans, the 
basis of literary criticism. Napoleon, Byronism, the 
vagaries of fashion, abolitionism, the problem of 
death and immortality — indeed, the range of topics 
and the author's discursiveness are the first charac- 
teristics of the book to impress the reader. It has 
youth written upon every page ; it is the notebook of 
a young man who has read widely and thoughtfully 
and who is ready to give his dictum on every subject. 
There is often a note of exaggeration and cocksure- 
ness in it. Philip speaks as one having authority ; 
there is no peradventure in his criticism ; he is the 
autocrat of the conversation. The dialogue form, 
which was evidently suggested by Eckermann and 
Landor, makes no addition to the value of the work. 



INTRODUCTION. xv 

The conversation is lifeless and artificial. It is but 
justice to the young author, however, to explain that 
he made no attempt to attain dramatic effect. He 
adopted the dialogue form simply to allow greater 
freedom for introducing all manner of material. Some 
of his opinions are immature and ill-considered. His 
later judgment sometimes reversed his verdicts. For 
instance, in his last days he could say of Ford, "- I 
find that the greater part of what I once took on trust 
as precious is really paste and pinchbeck." Thus far 
one may criticise the book with confidence, but the 
careful reader is soon silent. He quickly forgets all 
minor defects, for the spontaneous enthusiasm of the 
generous young poet is contagious. He soon discov- 
ers that there is method even in his discursiveness, 
that the author had before him a main thesis that he 
never lost sight of. 

Every revival of English song has been preceded 
by a defence of poetry. One needs mention only 
Puttenham^s *' Arte of English Poesy," Harrington's 
** Apology," and Sidney^s *' Defense," which pre- 
ceded the Elizabethan outburst, or Shelley's ** De- 
fense of Poetry," Leigh Hunt's '* What is Poetry?" 
and Wordsworth's * ' Prefaces " which preluded the 
later burst of English song. Lowell's '* Conversa- 
tions " was the defence of poesy which ushered in 
the great song era in America. Its message was 
clear and unmistakable. ''It is time," the young poet 
cries, *' to return to the poetic ideals of the old days 
when freedom and spontaneous utterance, sincerity 
and true earnestness prevailed ; when poets cared 



X vi INTR OD UC TION, 

not a rush for fashions and models, but sang from 
their hearts." Despite his discursive methods, de- 
spite page after page of material that seems like the 
random jottings of an omnivorous reader, there may 
be found in the book one steady purpose, one dom- 
inant message : There must be a break completely 
and absolutely from the artificial methods that so 
long have bound English song; *' Poetry is some- 
thing to make us wiser and better, by continually 
revealing those types of beauty and truth which God 
has set in all men's souls ; " < * Nature should lead 
the true poet by the hand ; " to such a one nothing 
is mean or unpoetic ; verse and rhyme are not arti- 
ficial and arbitrary things, — poetry should move as 
naturally as the winds and the waters ; the poet is a 
prophet, he is inspired, and his message is sponta- 
neous. 

To illustrate his conception of poetry Lowell first 
made a study of Chaucer. The old master had not 
been appreciated at his full value, he maintained, 
simply because he had been read in classic versions. 
**Put no faith at all," he cried, *' in any idea you 
may have got of Chaucer from Dryden or Pope." 
He would open the eyes of his generation to the real 
beauties of Chaucer. He dwells upon his sincerity 
and plainness, his originality and whole-hearted 
enthusiasm, his freshness and exuberance. ** Read- 
ing him is like brushing through the dewy grass at 
sunrise. Everything is new and sparkling and fra- 
grant." Skilfully he contrasts him with Pope, the 
high priest of artificiality, and with Byron, the type 



INTR OD UCTION. x vii 

of self-consciousness. He dwells upon his treatment 
of nature, and his democratic spirit, to which noth- 
ing honest was mean or unworthy of poetic treatment. 
* ' Nothing that God has thought it beneath him to 
make does he deem it beneath him to study and 
prove worthy of all admiration." The influence of 
Pope had been destructive of the true poetic spirit. 
It had tyrannized over even Wordsworth until it had 
warped and narrowed him. He had ^broken from the 
classic school by a system of reasoning, and had thus 
become a philosopher rather than a perfect lyrist, as 
nature had intended. *' The old poets lived in too 
sincere an age, and were too truly independent to 
think independence a virtue. To try to be inde- 
pendent is to acknowledge slavery." 
The true poet is a priest. He has an 

" Infantine, 
Familiar clasp of things divine." 

** Reverence is the foundation of all poetry," and 
love is its superstructure. ** The poet's heart is an 
unlighted torch which gives no help to his footsteps 
till love has touched it with flame." ** God is not 
far from that heart to which man is near." From 
this standpoint Lowell criticises the Puritanic spirit 
and the modern church. There must be, he declares, 
a spiritual and religious revolution in America before 
a burst of true poetry is possible. Again he instances 
Chaucer, who was not a churchman, but who had in 
his heart all the essentials of true piety. ** There 
was no intentional piety about Chaucer, no French 



X viii INTR OD UC TION. 

collar-and-wristband morality too common in our 
day," but he had a natural piety which was honest, 
and fearless, and true. 

He further illustrates his ideal of poetry by a study 
of the Elizabethan dramatists. In them " there is 
the beauty of health, strength, and invincible sin- 
cerity."" They wrote from the heart rather than from 
the intellect. *' They wrote before the good English 
word feeling had whined itself into the French one 
seiitimenty He chooses Chapman as a type, and 
shows to what heights he rises above *' the dead 
marsh-level of Pope." '* If Chapman be not classi- 
cal he has the higher merit of earnestness, sincerity, 
and rugged heartiness." He selects Ford as an ex- 
ample, since there is ** something grand and free 
about him." ''He is marked by an abandoned 
earnestness, and willingness, and sincerity." 

Everywhere in the book we catch this full, free 
atmosphere. The young poet can bide no restraint. 
To him poesy is as sacred as religion, as free as the 
hill winds, and as spontaneous as the songs of the 
spring birds. He believed with the unfettered Eliza- 
bethans '' that Poesy demanded the enthralling and 
ennobling toil of a whole life, the heart, soul, will, 
life, everything, of those who professed her service." 
There was need to return to this old ideal, for Eng- 
lish poetry had been dominated by the intellect until 
" Parnassus is now shrunk to a modern mountain ; 
Hippocrene has dwindled to a scant rill." 

Especially did the America of 1845 have need for 
this stirring message. The breath of that spring 



INTR OD UCTION. xix 

morning which had fanned the cheeks of Burns and 
Wordsworth had been long in crossing the Atlantic. 
America had been too busy to dally with the poets. 
** It has become a mercantile world/' complains the 
young enthusiast, '' and if some murmur of the poet's 
song creep into the counting-room, it thinks of the 
insane asylum, and runs up another column of fig- 
ures." Even the few who delighted in the poets had 
been taught to prefer the classical measures of Pope. 
John, who in the conversation serves as a foil for 
Philip, represents this class. *' I confess," he de- 
clares after Philip has shown most convincingly the 
superior charms of the romantic singers, "I can 
hardly shake off the influence of early education in 
favor of the French school of poets." The few poets 
which America boasted at the end of the first half- 
century of our national life had broken but little from 
this influence. A few spontaneous notes there had 
been, but they had died away unappreciated. Fre- 
neau had spent his last years in obscurity ; Bryant, 
to be sure, had won a considerable audience, but it 
was chiefly because of the cold and classic beauty of 
his verse. In the late thirties even the imitators 
had ceased to be heard. It was a period of poetic 
darkness, but it happily proved to be the darkness 
before the sunrise. Soon America was to ring with 
a joyous matin chorus. The influence of Lowell at 
this critical moment in schooling his countrymen in 
poetic art, in making them appreciate the burst of 
song when once it came, and in directing the chorus 
so that it echoed few of the classic chords can hardly 



XX INTRODUCTION. 

be over-estimated. What Longfellow did at this 
period in acquainting America with German senti- 
mental poetry, and what Felton accomplished in 
introducing the Greek poets, Lowell may fairly be 
said to have done in bringing to his countrymen a 
new conception of the old masters of romantic song. 
*' The Conversations on Some of the Old Poets" is 
thus a landmark in the history of American poetry. 

Then, too, the book has a real value as a docu- 
ment showing the evolution of Lowell's critical 
method. He began as a poet rather than as a critic. 
He cared not at all to be scientific, to analyze in 
cold blood, to trace the genesis and evolution of a 
poet's art. He aimed at the heart, not at the intel- 
lect. A poem to him was notable just in proportion 
as it had power to move him, and he judged his com- 
ment upon it to be effective just in proportion as it 
had power to move the feelings of his hearers. 
*' Taste is the next gift to genius," he declared. 
*' Taste is the first great requisite of a critic. Learn- 
ing, ingenuity, and boldness are merely its hand- 
maidens." He has nothing but scorn for him who 
** would confidently reduce Art to a chessboard, 
upon which all the combinations are mathematically 
calculable and exhaustible." It was enough simply 
to praise and interpret what one's taste declared to 
be good: *' The only safe method is to point out 
what parts of a poem please the critic, and let the 
rest go." 

This poetic basis of LowelPs criticism is the cause 
of his discursiveness. The poetic mind is not scien- 



INTRODUCTION. xxi 

tific and direct, it is impressionistic and erratic. He 
wouM write of the dramatist Ford, but he makes no 
gradual historical approach to him ; he simply points 
out what in Ford has most impressed him. Further- 
more, less than one-third of the paper has any con- 
nection with the subject proposed in the title. Even 
in his latest essays Lowell was fond of wandering far 
afield, and of following to its end every delightful 
by-path. The poetic basis of his criticism accounts, 
too, for the vast amount of figurative language in his 
prose work. In a space of several pages in the * * Con- 
versations '' there is but one plain sentence. He de- 
lighted in metaphors. <' A metaphor," he declared, 
** if the correspondence be perfect in all its parts, is 
one of the safest guides through the labyrinth of 
truth." The more frequent the figures the nearer to 
poetry, for it is the prime mission of poetry to show 
analogies between the seen and the unseen, between 
the material and the spiritual, between the human 
and the divine. How like a lyric poem is his criti- 
cism of Chaucer commencing, '* There is in him the 
exuberant freshness and greenness of spring. Every- 
thing he touches leaps into full blossom." His 
figures are always fresh and original, always illuminat- 
ing: **When Chaucer describes his shipman we 
seem to smell tar." ** In Chaucer's poetry the humor 
is playing all the time round the horizon like heat 
lightning." *'He loved speculation, and when he 
was running down some theological dogma, he does 
not mind leaping the church inclosure and pursuing 
his prey till it takes refuge under the cassock of the 



xxii INTRODUCTION. 

priest himself." One may safely quote almost at 
random . A droll humor of the * ' Biglow Papers " 
type crops out often in his figures, sometimes broad 
and evident, sometimes sly and sarcastic. ** Dip- 
lomatists," he explains in one place, *' are like the 
two Yankees who swapped jackknives together till 
each had cleared five dollars." 

Thus the first prose work of Lowell w^as a highly 
influential and significant book. Crude it may be in 
places, but its very crudity is one of its charms. It 
is fresh and spontaneous, full of a young man's whole- 
souled enthusiasm, full of the breath of the spring 
morning, when it was written. No true lover of 
poetry can afford to leave it unread, for it contains 
much that is worthy of Lowell in his best days, and 
over it there hangs the radiant morning glow that 
brings it almost into the region of true poesy. 

Fred Lewis Pattee. 
March, 1901. 



CONVERSATIONS. 



FIRST CONVERSATION. 
CHAUCER. 



JOHN. 

Here you are, I see, as usual, ramparted around 
with musty volumes of the old poets. I remember 
how you used to pore over them in the college 
library. Are you not afraid that the wheels of 
your mind will get choked with the dust that rises 
out of these dry mummy-pits ? 

PHILIP. 

Even if I were to allow the justice of your last 
metaphor, I could reply that the dust is at least that 
of kings. You must remember, also, that even this 
dust is not without its uses. The rich brown pig- 
ment which our painters use is made out of it, — 
another material illustration of the spiritual truth, 
that nothing which ever had a meaning for mankind 
loses it by the lapse of years. 



2 FIRST CONVERSATION'. 

JOHN. 

It may, however, become so overgrown with moss 
as hardly to repay the labor of the restoring chisel. 
But to return to our mummies. Our modern poets 
seem fully aware of the fact that what is true of one 
art is true also of all the others. They are as fond 
of using this coloring, made out of dead men's bones, 
as the painters. One must be turning at every other 
stanza to his glossary in order to understand them, 
so full are they of archaisms. They seem to have 
plagiarized from the cheesemongers, who inoculate 
their new cheeses with a bit of mould to give them 
the flavor of old ones. 

PHILIP. 

An imitation of style is one thing ; the use of the 
same material is quite another. The marble of 
Pentelicus may be carved into other shapes as noble 
as the Phoebus or the Jupiter. It has no prejudice 
in favor of the Greek mythology ; and Hiram Pow- 
ers, I fancy, can persuade it to look godlike even in 
a coat and pantaloons. Language is the marble in 
which the poet carver; and if he find that which the 
old poets used aptest to his hand, let him not mar 
his work from an idle prejudice in favor of the quar- 
ries of Berkshire or Vermont. You find no fault with 
Crawford's "• Orpheus," which sends you to your 
Lempri^re, as you complain that the modern poets 
do to your glossary. Yet that statue is the more 
guilty of the two ; for that is an attempt to resusci- 
tate the Greek spirit, while these only use what they 



* CHAUCER, 3 

think the best material in which to convey an idea 
of to-day. Pericles would be the fittest critic of that ; 
but one of our old dramatists would soon find him- 
self beyond his depth in these. 

JOHN. 

You have touched me in a tender spot. I admit 
that the fault is not confined to our poets. Our 
sculptors run to Greece, and our painters to Italy. 
Our Quincy stonecutters, in their Corinthian col- 
umns, show almost as much originality of design. 
I have seen portraits of New York ladies after the 
Fornarina, and the Washington in our State house 
has borrowed the toga of Fabius to hide his conti^ 
nental uniform with. This is what is called being 
classical; and it is so indeed, after '* the high Ro- 
man fashion ; " for the Romans plundered a temple 
of its gold and its gods at the same time, stealing 
the ideas as well as the freedom of the nation they 
subjugated. This gave point to the saying of one 
of their countrymen, that Greece had made a slave 
of her conqueror. I see the distinction you would 
make between the poets and their brother artists, 
but I am not yet ready to admit its justice. 

PHILIP. 

If you have seen the distinction, you have already 
admitted its justice. I would find no fault with the 
painter who should draw the Virgin with a glory* 
about her head, for that is as easily credible now as 
in Giotto's day. The intellect may be skeptical, but 
the heart will believe any beautiful miracle in behalf 



4 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

of what it loves or reveres ; and the heart, after all, 
will have the last word in such matters. So the 
naked figure is in itself beautiful, but that would be 
no apology for putting Franklin's head upon the 
shoulders of the Antinous. Yet there are examples 
enough of such foolishness. Our artists seem to 
think that none but a Greek or Roman costume is 
admissible at the court of posterity. Yet posterity 
is delighted to greet Burns in his clouted shoon, and 
I am sure would never receive Washington (who 
knew better) in the indecent undress of a Roman 
statue. With our poets the case is different. They 
have adopted the style of those who used our noble 
language ere it had been crossed with the French. 
The dialect, too, which was contemporary with our 
translation of the Bible, will, for that reason, if for 
no other, carry a greater solemnity with it than that 
of any later period. The English of that day is 
racy with the old Saxon idiom, which was dear to 
the mass of the people, and which still maintains its 
gripe upon all the natural feelings with which poetry 
has most to do. Forms and conventionalities put 
on, as a matter of course, the court dress of the 
Norman conquerors ; but the heart clung sturdily 
to its old Saxon homespun, and felt the warmer for 
it. You talk about the golden age of Queen Anne. 
It was a French pinchbeck age. 

JOHN. 

Stay, not so fast. I like the writers of that period 
for the transparency of their style and their freedom 



CHAUCER, 5 

from affectation. If I may trust my understanding 
of your meaning, our modern versifiers have only 
made the simple discovery that an appearance of 
antiquity is the cheapest passport to respect. But 
the cheapest which we purchase with subservience is 
too dear. You yourself have no such prejudice 
against the Augustan age of English literature. I 
have caught you more than once with the *' Tatler" 
in your hand, and have heard you praising Dryden's 
prefaces. 

PHILIP. 

You and I have very different notions of what 
poetry is, and of what its object should be. You 
may claim for Pope the merit of an envious eye, 
which could turn the least scratch upon the charac- 
ter of a friend into a fester, of a nimble and adroit 
fancy, and of an ear so niggardly that it could afford 
but one invariable ccesura to his verse ; but when 
you call him poet, you insult the buried majesty of 
all earth's noblest and choicest spirits. Nature 
should lead the true poet by the hand, and he has 
far better things to do than to busy himself in count- 
ing the warts upon it, as Pope did. A cup of water 
from Hippocrene, tasting, as it must, of innocent 
pastoral sights and sounds, of the bleat of lambs, of 
the shadows of leaves and flowers that have leaned 
over it, of the rosy hands of children whose privilege 
it ever is to paddle in it, of the low words of lovers 
who have walked by its side in the moonlight, of the 
tears of the poor Hagars of the world who have 
drunk from it, would choke a satirist. His thoughts 



6 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

of the country must have a savor of Jack Ketch, and 
see no beauty but in a hemp-field. Poetry is some- 
thing to make us wiser and better, by continually 
revealing those types of beauty and truth which 
God has set in all men's souls ; not by picking out 
the petty faults of our neighbors to make a mock of. 
Shall that divine instinct, which has in all ages con- 
cerned itself only with what is holiest and fairest in 
life and nature, degrade itself to go about seeking for 
the scabs and ulcers of the putridest spirits, to grin 
over with a derision more hideous even than the piti- 
ful quarry it has moused at ? Asmodeus's gift of 
unroofing the dwellings of his neighbors at will 
would be the rarest outfit for a satirist, but it would 
be of no worth to a poet. To the satirist the mere 
outward motives of life are enough. Vanity, pride, 
avarice, these and the other external vices are the 
strings of his unmusical lyre. But the poet need 
only unroof his own heart. All that makes happiness 
or misery under every roof of the wide world, whether 
of palace or hovel, is working also in that narrow 
yet boundless sphere. On that little stage the great 
drama of life is acted daily. There the creation, the 
tempting, and the fall may be seen anew. In that 
withdrawing-closet solitude whispers her secrets, and 
death uncovers his face. There sorrow takes up her 
abode, to make ready a pillow and a resting place for 
the weary head of love, whom the world casts out. 
To the poet nothing is mean, but everything on 
earth is a fitting altar to the supreme beauty. 
But I am wandering. As for the poets of Queen 



CHAUCER, 7 

Anne's reign, it is enough to prove what a kennel 
standard of poetry was then estabUshed, that Swift's 
smutchy verses are not even yet excluded from the 
collections. What disgusting stuff, too, in Prior 
and Parnell ! Yet Swift, perhaps, was the best 
writer of English whom that period produced. Wit- 
ness his prose. Pope treated the English language 
as the image-man has served the bust of Shakspeare 
yonder. To rid it of some external soils he has 
rubbed it down till there is no muscular expression 
left. It looks very much as his own *' mockery 
king of snow " must have done after it had begun to 
melt. Pope is forever mixing water with the good 
old mother's milk of our tongue. You cannot get a 
straightforward speech out of him. A great deal of 
his poetry is so incased in verbiage that it puts me 
in mind of those important-looking packages which 
boys are fond of sending to their friends. We un- 
fold envolope after envelope, and at last find a couple 
of cherry-stones. But in Pope we miss the laugh 
which in the other case follows the culmination of 
the joke. He makes Homer lisp like the friar in 
Chaucer, and Ajax and Belinda talk exactly alike. 

JOHN. 

Well, we are not discussing the merits of Pope, 
but of the archaisms which have been introduced 
into modern poetry. What you say of the Bible has 
some force in it. The forms of speech used in our 
version of it will always impress the mind, even if 
applied to an entirely different subject. What else 
can you bring forward ? 



8 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

PHILIP. 

Only the fact that by going back to the more nat- 
ural style of the Elizabethan writers our verse has 
gained in harmony as well as strength. No matter 
whether Pope is describing the cane of a fop or the 
speech of a demigod, the pause must always fall on 
the same syllable, and the sense be chopped off by 
the same rhyme. Achilles cannot gallop his horses 
round the walls of Troy, with Hector dragging be- 
hind his chariot, except he keep time to the immiti- 
gable seesaw of the couplet. 

JOHN. 

But all verse and rhyme are as artificial as you say 
Pope^s ccBsura is. Conceive of Macbeth, a mon- 
arch who classed '* fools, minstrels, and bards " to- 
gether in one penal enactment, delivering himself in 
blank verse ! ^ 

PHILIP. 

Shakspeare knew better than he did how he ought 
to have talked. But I do not agree with you that 
either rhyme or verse is unnatural. Some of our 
thoughts refuse to be written except in rhyme, and 
in the hands of a true poet this is no hindrance, but 
the rhyme seems always to have a meaning of its 
own, and to add to, or at least confirm, the senti- 
ment. Metre and rhyme are like the skin of the 
grape. The thought is the pulp. The one is needed 

1 See Bellenden's translation of Boece's " Chron." The his- 
torian adds, " Thir and siclik lawis war usit oy King Makbeth; 
throw quhilk he governitthe realme X yeris in gud justice,^'* 



CHAUCER, 9 

to hold the other firmly together in a compact and 
beautiful shape. We may throw it away, if we will ; 
but often the chief spirit and flavor of the fruit is to 
be pressed out of it. 

Without doubt, the fittest vehicle for grave and 
stately thoughts is the blank verse, and that has not 
been improved in the dramatic form since the old 
dramatists, nor in the epic since Milton. Words- 
worth has been satisfied with giving us fresh combi- 
nations of thought, and with reasserting the dignity 
and worth of the poet^s calling. As far as metre is 
concerned, he is the least original of writers. He 
has imitated all our masters in turn. In his sonnets 
he has sometimes emulated successfully the con- 
densed gravity of Milton ; but his blank verse seldom 
rises to the majestic level of his great precursor. He 
oftener reminds us of Cowper, who introduced a new 
and more conversational manner. Milton's verse 
suggests nothing meaner than the ocean ; Cowper's 
has that easy dignity which does not become trivial, 
even when it describes the simmering of the tea- 
kettle. I think that Keats saw deeper into the 
mystery of this noble metre than any modern poet. 
Tennyson has, perhaps, added another grace to it. 

JOHN. 

You attribute a greater state and importance not 
only to the poet's art, but even to the mere mechan- 
ical details of it, than I should be willing to allow. 
You sometimes remind me of that sect of sonneteers 
whom Charles Lamb, in a letter to Coleridge, hu- 



lo FIRST CONVERSATION. 

morously describes as attributing a mystical im- 
portance to a capital O. You have, however, the 
great mass of the critics with you, who usually pay 
more heed to the material than to the idea which it 
conveys, and who do not scruple to break off the 
nose from a statue, and present it to you as a proof 
of the excellence of the marble. Beauty of form, 
correctness of outline, and aptness for use (which 
last, indeed, demands the other tw^o) seem to be of 
no account with them; Is it mahogany or veneering? 
is the question with them, and they settle the matter 
by a slash with their penknives. 

PHILIP. 

The zest with which you ran down your last 
metaphor persuades me that you agree with me at 
heart. The great poets, it is true, have not usually 
at first received the imprimatur of the critics ; for it 
demands more labor and more faith than they have 
to spare, to get at the secret of anything that is 
greatly worth. We must wrestle with these messen- 
gers of heaven, as Jacob did, ere we obtain their 
blessing ; and then they sometimes make a slave of 
our judgment, so that we halt for it ever after. 
Richter has lamed Carlyle a little. 

JOHN. 

All great ideas come to us, at first, like the gods 
of Homer, enveloped in a blinding mist ; but to him 
whom their descent to earth concerns, to him who 
stands most in need of their help, the cloud becomes 
luminous and fragrant, and betrays the divinity 



CHA UCER. 1 1 

behind it. At present, these old poets of yours are 
in the cloudy state to me. Perhaps you can show 
me that I also am included in the benefit of their 
errand. Perhaps you can justify to me, out of their 
mouths, what now seems to me your extravagant 
estimate of the rank which belongs to poetry. 

PHILIP. 

Before attempting it, let me add something which 
occurs to me on the subject of a metrical disposition 
of our words. Whether it be an argument in its 
favor or not, I shall not take upon myself to say. 
At least, the reflection has been forced upon me 
many times, and not without some touch of painful- 
ness. Even in my slight commerce with society, I 
have been obliged to notice a certain bashfulness 
which seems to clog men in the utterance of a noble 
or generous thought. We have become such ephem- 
erides, such hangers-on of King To-day, that we 
seem hasty to smother, with a judicious cough, any 
allusion to our dethroned monarch, God. A harm- 
less kind of dinner-table loyalty, like that of the old 
Jacobites, may be winked at ; but thorough piety, 
which is the element wherein all good thought and 
action can alone subsist, is quite out of fashion. 
Now verse seems to furnish men with a sufficient 
apology for giving way to their holy enthusiasm. It 
is the politician's vocation to give us only homoeo- 
pathic doses of truth, a grain of the medicine to a 
whole Niagara of water and froth. The priest is 
fashioned by his hearers, and is too often rather the 



12 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

pillow of down for their consciences than the con- 
ductor of the arrowy lightnings of God's wrath. He 
values Christ's words at more than his heart, and will 
denounce what he, but not what his doctrines, con- 
demned. He remembers his meekness, and takes 
care to forget the whip of small cords. But the poet 
can echo the eternal harmonies in the very face of 
the prodigal world, without winking or stammering. 
The tar is always hot and the feather-bed ready un- 
ripped for him who utters his conscience in plain 
prose ; but there is a charm in verse, which saves 
scathless the preacher of those most ancient doctrines 
which are termed new whenever they are revived. 
George Herbert says, 

'' A verse may find him who a sermon flies, 
And turn delight into a sacrifice." 

JOHN. 

Your notion is a fanciful one. It is only because 
the poet is nearer to a state of nature in spiritual 
things than other men, and because his natural in- 
stinct for truth is keener, that he is the master of a 
more inspired utterance. We stupidly call the life 
of savages a state of nature, as if Nature loved our 
bestial qualities better than our divine ones. The 
condition of the poet may be more truly named so, 
in whom the highest refinement of civilization 
consists with the utmost simplicity of the unblunted 
spiritual instincts. He is weatherwise in the signs 
of Providence. The dense, hot air, which foretells 
the coming earthquake of a revolution in the moral 



CHA UCER. 



13 



world, grows painful to his lungs, while other men 
can yet breathe freely in it. Trifles, which other 
natures pass by unheeded, are to him unerring finger- 
posts. He can trace God's footsteps by a broken 
twig or a misplaced leaf. But, after all, it is only the 
music of the verse and not the mere form of verse 
itself that makes the poet's truths more welcome. 
Music understands all languages, and she interprets 
between him and his hearers. You see I have been 
tearing a leaf out of your own book. The truth is 
that the world cares very little about the matter. It 
has become a mercantile world, and if some murmur 
of the poet's song creep into the counting-room, it 
thinks of the insane asylum and runs up another 
column of figures. But when a rude fellow pushes in, 
and becomes downright abusive in e very-day speech, 
and gives the respectable world the lie without scru- 
ple, why then, if the constable be not at hand, a writ 
of trespass is sued out in Judge Lynch's court ! So, 
too, of the preacher. The world goes to church to 
be quiet, and takes it amiss to be interrupted in a 
calculation of the price of cotton by a personal refer- 
ence to any of its own bosom sins. The world has 
engaged the preacher to abuse the Scribes and Phari- 
sees, and not to be looking too nicely after its own 
conscience. The world believes firmly that the 
whole race of Scribes and Pharisees was dead and 
buried two thousand years ago, and sees no harm in 
being a little severe upon their foibles, especially as 
there are no surviving relatives whose feelings can be 
set on edge by it. But let us come back to the poets. 



14 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

PHILIP. 

With all my heart. You smile when my hobby 
takes the bit between his teeth, but seem uncon- 
scious of your own John Gilpin excursions. My 
first thought was to have read you only some pas- 
sages from the Elizabethan dramatists ; but I have 
changed my mind. I remember hearing you say 
that the obsoleteness of Chaucer^s dialect had de- 
terred you from the attempt to read him. 

JOHN. 

Yes, I was desirous of a further acquaintance with 
a poet whom Dryden and Pope esteemed worthy of 
their toil in translating. But he is impregnably 
hemmed in from me by a quickset hedge of obscure 
and antiquated phrases. 

PHILIP. 

So it seems at first sight. But if you had the 
stout heart of the prince in the fairy tale, you would 
soon have broken the charm, and would have found 
the deserted old palace suddenly full of all the noise 
and bustle of every-day employment, as well as the 
laughter and tears of every-day life. You must put 
no faith at all in any idea you may have got of 
Chaucer from Dryden or Pope. Dryden appreciated 
his original better than Pope ; but neither of them 
had a particle of his humor, nor of the simplicity of 
his pathos. The strong point in Pope's displays of 
sentiment is in the graceful management of a cambric 
handkerchief. You do not believe a word that 



CHA UCER. 



15 



Heloise says, and feel all the while that she is squeez- 
ing out her tears as if from a half-dry sponge. Pope 
was not a man to understand the quiet tenderness of 
Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot 
tears falling, and the simple, choking words sobbed 
out. I know no author so tender as he, not even 
Shakspeare. There is no declamation in his grief. 
Dante is scarcely more downright and plain. To 
show you how little justice Dryden has done him, I 
will first read you a few lines from his version of 
**The Knight's Tale," and then the corresponding 
ones of the original. It is the death scene of Arcite. 



'to' 



" Conscience (that of all physic works the last) 
Caused him to send for Emily in haste. 
With her, at his desire, came Palamon ; 
Then, on his pillow raised, he thus begun: 
' No language can express the smallest part 
Of what I feel and suffer in my heart 
For you, whom best I love and value most ; 
But to your service I bequeath my ghost ; 
Which, from this mortal body when untied^ 
Unseen, unheard, shall hover at your side, 
Nor fright you waking, nor your sleep offend, 
But wait officious, and your steps attend; 
How I have loved ! excuse my faltering tongue ; 
My spirit ''s feeble and 7ny pains are strong ; 
This I may say : I only grieve to die, 
Because I lose my charming Emily, '* " 

JOHN. 
I am quite losing my patience. The sentiment 
of Giles Scroggins and the verse of Blackmore ! 



1 6 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

Surely, nothing but the meanest servility to his 
original could excuse such slovenly workmanship 
as this. 

PHILIP. 

There is worse to come. Of its fidelity as a trans- 
lation you can judge for yourself when you hear 
Chaucer. 

*' 'To die when Heaven had put you in my power, 
Fate could not choose a more malicious hour ! 
What greater curse could envious Fortune give 
Than just to die when I began to live? 
Vain men, how vanishing a bliss we crave ! 
Now war 771 in love, now withering in the grave ! 
Never, O, never 7nore to see the suit ! 
Still dark in a da77ip vault, and still alofie ! 
This fate is common.' " 

I wish you especially to bear in mind the lines I 
have emphasized. Notice, too, how the rhyme is 
impertinently forced upon the attention throughout. 
We can hardly help wondering if a nuncupatory tes- 
tament were ever spoken in verse before. There is 
none of this French-lustre in Chaucer. 

'' Arcite must die ; 
For which he sendeth after Emily, 
And Palamon, that was his cousin dear ; 
Then spake he thus, as ye shall after hear : 
' Ne'er may the woful spirit in my heart 
Declare one point of all my sorrow's smart, 
To you, my lady, that I love the most; 
But I bequeath the service of my ghost 
To you aboven any cre-a-ture, 
Since that my life may now no longer dure. 



CHAUCER. 17 

Alas, the woe ! alas, the pains so strong, 

That I for you have suffered, — and so long ! 

Alas, the death ! alas, mine Emily ! 

Alas, the parting of our company ! 

Alas, my heart's true queen ! alas, my wife ! 

My heart's dear lady, ender of my life ! 

What is this world ? What asketh man to have ? 

Now with his love, — now in his cold, cold grave, 

Alone, withouten any company ! 

Farewell, my sweet ! farewell, mine Emily ! 

And softly take me in your armes twey (two arms), 

For love of God, and hearken what I say.' " 

JOHN. 

Perfect! I would not have a word changed, ex- 
cept the second ** cold" before "grave." It takes 
away from the simplicity, and injures the effect ac- 
cordingly. In the lines just before that I could fancy 
that I heard the dying man gasp for breath. After 
hearing this, Dryden's exclamation-marks savor of 
the play-bills, where one sees them drawn up in pla- 
toons, as a body-guard to the name of an indifferent 
player, their number being increased in proportion 
as the attraction diminishes. And in that seemingly 
redundant line, 

'* Alone, withouten any company," 

how does the repetition and amplification give force 
and bitterness to the thought, as if Arcite must need 
dwell on his expected loneliness, in order to feel it 
fully ! There is nothing here about ' ' charuiing 
Emily," "envious Fortune," no bandying of com- 



1 8 FIRST CONVERSATION. , 

pliments. Death shows to Arcite, as he does mostly 
to those who are cut off suddenly in the May-time 
and blossom of the senses, as a bleak, bony skeleton, 
and nothing more. Dryden, I remember, in his 
** Art of Poetry " says, 

*' Chaucer alone, fixed on this solid base. 
In his old style conserves a modern grace ; 
Too happy, if the freedom of his rhymes 
Offended not the method of our times." 

But if what you have read (unless you have soft- 
ened it greatly) be a specimen of his rudeness, save 
us from such "■ method '"' as that of Dryden ! 

PHILIP. 

I hardly changed a syllable. The word to which 
you objected, as redundant, was an addition of my 
own to eke out the measure, "• cold^ " being pro- 
nounced as two syllables in Chaucer^s time. The 
language of the heart never grows obsolete or anti- 
quated, but falls as musically from the tongue now 
as when it was first uttered. Such lustiness and 
health of thought and expression seldom fail of leav- 
ing issue behind them. One may trace a family 
likeness to these in many of Spenser's lines, and I 
please myself sometimes with imagining pencil-marks 
of Shakspeare's against some of my favorite passages 
in Chaucer. At least, the relationship may be traced 
through Spenser, who calls Chaucer his master, and 
to whom Shakspeare pays nearly as high a compli- 
ment. 



CHAUCER, 19 

JOHN. 

I suppose you refer to the sonnet, usually printed 
with his, but now generally ascribed to some one 
else. 

PHILIP. 

To Barnaby Barnes ; but hardly, I would fain be- 
lieve, on sound authority. At any rate, there is enough 
in Shakspeare^s earlier poems to prove that he ad- 
mired Spenser fully to the measure of that sonnet. 
I know nothing more full of delight and encourage- 
ment than to trace the influence of one great and true 
spirit upon another. It adds to the dignity of both, 
and gives our love for them a nobler argument. How 
must Chaucer have become, for a moment, sweetly 
conscious of his laurel, even in paradise, at hearing 
his name spoken reverently by Spenser and Milton 
and Wordsworth ! 

JOHN. 

I doubt if we were out of purgatory by the time 
Spenser wrote. You would pardon anything to a 
poet whom you love, and imagine him in paradise 
forthwith, when very likely his teeth are chattering 
on this side of the door. Chaucer had his sins to 
answer for. 

PHILIP. 

Nay, I fancy that if the priests, whose cassocks 
he stripped from their shoulders, had the arrange- 
ment of the afterpiece, we must look for him where 
his bays will hardly keep him cool. It is true that I 
would pardon more to a poet, because he needs par- 



20 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

don the most. If he be not excellent, he needs it 
because he has keener perceptions of goodness ; and 
if he be sinful, he needs it because his temptation to 
evil is in like manner stronger, and his own imagina- 
tion sometimes unlocks a postern for vice to enter at. 
God does not weigh criminality in our scales. We 
have one absolute standard, with the seal of authority 
upon it ; and with us an ounce is an ounce and a 
pound a pound. If we have winked while Bigotry 
and Superstition were tampering with the weights, 
adding a little to one and stealing as much from 
another, to suit their convenience, it is our own fault. 
But God's measure is the heart of the offender, — a 
balance which varies with every one of us, a balance 
so delicate that a tear cast in the other side may 
make the weight of error kick the beam. The re- 
cording angel had but little trouble in footing Chau- 
cer's account. The uncleanness of his age has left 
a smooch here and there upon his poems ; but it is 
only in the margin, and may be torn off without in- 
jury to the text. His love of beauty was too sincere 
not to have made him truly pious. It was not a 
holy day dress, folded up and lavendered for one day 
in the week ; but his singing-robe, which he wore 
into the by-lanes and hovels of every-day life. 

JOHN. 

After all, your Chaucer was a satirist, and you 
should, in justice, test him with the same acid which 
you applied so remorselessly to Pope. 



/ 



CHAUCER. 21 

PHILIP. 

I 

Chaucer's satire is of quite another complexion. A 
hearty laugh and a thrust in the ribs are his weapons. 
He makes fun of you to your face, and even if you 
wince a little, you cannot help joining in his mirth. 
He does not hate a vice because he has a spite 
against the man who is guilty of it. He does not cry, 
** A rat i' the arras ! " and run his sword through a 
defenceless old man behind it. But it is not for his 
humor, nor, indeed, for any one quality, that our old 
Chaucer is dear and sacred to me. I love to call 
him ^/<3f'Chaucer. The farther I can throw him back 
into the past, the dearer he grows ; so sweet is it to 
mark how his plainness and sincerity outlive all 
changes of the outward world. Antiquity has always 
something reverend in it. Even its most material 
and perishable form, which we see in pyramids, 
cairns, and the like, is brooded over by a mysterious 
presence which strangely awes us. Whatever has 
been hallowed by the love and pity, by the smiles and 
tears of men, becomes something more to us than the 
moss-covered epitaphs of a buried age. There was a 
meaning in the hieroglyphics which Champollion 
could not make plainer. It is only from association 
with Man that anything seems old. The quarries of 
the Nile may be coeval with the planet itself, yet it 
is only the still fresh dints of the Coptic chisel that 
gift them with the spell of ancientness. Let but the 
skeleton of a man be found among the remains of 
those extinct antediluvian monsters, and straightway 



2 2 FIRST CONVERSATION'. 

that which now claimed our homage, as a triumph of 
comparative anatomy, shall become full of awe and 
mystery, and dim with the gray dawnlight of time. 
Once, from those shapeless holes, a human soul 
looked forth upon its huge empire of past and future. 
Once, beneath those crumbling ribs, beat a human 
heart, that seeming narrow isthmus between time and 
eternity, wherein there was yet room for hope and 
fear, and love and sorrow, to dwell, with all their 
wondrous glooms and splendors = Before, we could 
have gone no farther back than Cuvier. Those 
mighty bones of ichthyosauri and plesiosauri seemed 
rather a record of his energy and patience than of a 
living epoch in earth's history. Now, how modern 
and of to-day seem Memnon and Elephanta ! If 
there be a venerableness in any outward symbols, in 
which rude and dumb fashion the soul of man first 
strove to utter itself, how much more is there in the 
clearer and more inspired sentences of ancient law- 
givers and poets ! 

JOHN. 

You have contrived verv adroitlv to get the Delug^e 
between us. I shall not attempt the perilous naviga- 
tion to your side, and can only wish you a safe 
return to mine. Camoens swam ashore from a ship- 
wreck with the Lusiad in his teeth ; and I hope you 
will do as much for Chaucer. I long to hear more 
of him. 

PHILIP. 

It would be easier for me to emulate Waterton's 
ride on the alligator's back, and make an extempore 



CHAUCER, 23 

steed of the most tractable-looking ichthyosaurus I can 
lay hands on. However, here I am safely back 
again. But before I read you anything more from 
Chaucer, I must please myself by praising him a 
little more. His simplicity often reminds me of 
Homer ; but, except in the single quality of inden- 
tion, I prefer him to the Ionian. Yet we must 
remember that he shares this deficiency with Shak- 
speare, who scarcely ever scrupled to run in debt for 
his plots. 

JOHN. 

I cannot allow any poverty in Shakspeare. Writ- 
ing, as he did, with hardly any aim beyond an 
immediate effect upon the stage, he instinctively felt 
how much easier it was to interest his audience in 
real characters, and in stories with which they were 
familiar. Invent the most ingenious plots for plays 
and pantomimes, and give all the advantage of more 
exuberant decoration, yet the old stories of the 
Forty Thieves and Jack the Giant-killer will win the 
unanimous verdict of the nursery. 

PHILIP. 

I do not believe that Shakspeare never thought of 
posterity, nor that any man was ever endowed with 
marvellous powers without being conscious of it, and 
desiring to make them felt. No man of genius was 
ever so fully appreciated by contemporaries as to 
make him forget the future. A poet must needs be 
before his own age to be even with posterity. There 
will, it is true, always be an uncomfortable simper 



24 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

and constraint about a man who is aware of the 
presence of a living audience. But when he appeals 
to the future, he selects his hearers wholly from the 
noble and magnanimous ; and there is a grandeur in 
the eyes that look upon him which renders anything 
but sincerity and great-mindedness impossible. There 
is ample proof in Shakspeare's sonnets, the most 
private and personal record of himself which he has 
left us, and in the care with which he corrected his 
plays, that he wrote more for readers than for play- 
goers. But we must come back to Chaucer. There 
is in him the exuberant freshness and greenness of 
spring. Everything he touches leaps into full blos- 
som. His gladness and humor and pathos are ir- 
repressible as a fountain. Dam them with a prosaic 
subject, and they overleap it in a sparkling cascade 
that turns even the hindrance to a beauty. Choke 
them with a tedious theological disquisition, and they 
bubble up forthwith, ail around it, with a delighted 
gurgle. There is no cabalistic Undine-stone or seal 
of Solomon that can shut them up forever. Reading 
him is like brushing through the dewy grass at sun- 
rise. Everything is new and sparkling and fragrant. 
He is of kin to Belphcebe, whose 

'■*■ Birth was of the womb of morning dew, 
And her conception of the joyous prime." 

I speak now of what was truly Chaucer. I strip 
away from him all that belonged to the time in which 
he lived, and judge him only by what belongs 
equally to all times. There is no nebulosity of senti- 



CHAUCER, 25 

ment about him, no insipid vagueness in his sym- 
pathies. His first merit, the chief one in all art, is 
sincerity. He does not strive to body forth some- 
thing which shall have a meaning ; but, having a 
clear meaning in his heart, he gives it as clear a 
shape. Sir Philip Sydney was of his mind, when he 
bade poets look into their own hearts and write. He 
is the most unconventional of poets, and the frankest. 
If his story be dull, he rids his hearers of all uncom- 
fortable qualms by being himself the first to yawn. 
He would have fared but ill in our day, when the 
naked feelings are made liable to the penalties of an 
act for indecent exposure. Very little care had he 
for the mere decencies of life. Were he alive now, 
I can conceive him sending a shudder through St. 
James's Coffeehouse, by thrusting his knife into his 
mouth ; or making all Regent Street shriek for harts- 
horn, by giving a cab-driver as good as he sent, in a 
style to have pleased old Burton. The highest 
merit of a poem is that it reflects alike the subject 
and the poet. It should be neither objective nor 
subjective exclusively. Reason should stand at the 
helm, though the wayward breezes of feeling must 
puff the sails. Nature has hinted at this, by setting 
the eyes higher than the heart. Chaucer's poems 
can claim more of the former than of the latter of 
these excellencies. His innocent self-forgetfulness 
gives us the truest glimpses into his own nature, and, 
at the same time, makes his pictures of outward 
objects wonderfully clear and vivid. Though many 
of his poems are written in the first person, yet there 



26 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

is not a shade of egoism in them. It is but the 
simple art of the story-teller to give more reality to 
what he tells. 

JOHN. 

Yes, it was not till our own day that the poets dis- 
covered what mystical significance had been lying 
dormant for ages in a capital I. It seems strange 
that a letter of such powerful bewitchment had not 
made part of the juggling wares of the Cabalists and 
Theurgists. Yet we find no mention of it in Rabbi 
Akiba or Cornelius Agrippa. Byron wrought miracles 
with it. I fear that the noble Stylites of modern 
song, who, from his lonely pillar of self, drew crowds 
of admiring votaries to listen to the groans of his 
self-inflicted misery, would have been left only to feel 
the cold and hunger of his shelterless pinnacle in 
Chaucer's simpler day. 

PHILIP. 

Yet, Byron always reminds me of that criminal 
who was shut in a dungeon, the walls of which grew 
every day narrower and narrower, till they crushed 
him at last. His selfishness walled him in from the 
first, so that he was never open to the sweet in- 
fluences of nature, and those sweeter ones which the 
true heart finds in life. The sides of his jail were 
semi-transparent, giving him a muddy view of things 
immediately about him ; but selfishness always builds 
a thick roof overhead, to cut ofl" the heavenward gaze 
of the spirit. And how did it squeeze the very life 
out of him, in the end ! 



CHA UCER, 



27 



JOHN. 

Byron^s spirit was more halt than his body. It 
had been well for him had he been as ashamed, or 
at least as conscious, of one as of the other. He 
should have been banished, like Philoctetes, to some 
Isle of Lemnos, where his lameness should not have 
been offensive and contagious. As it was, the world 
fell in love with the defect. Some malicious Puck 
had dropped the juice of " Love in Idleness '' upon 
its eyes, and limping came quite into fashion. We 
have never yet had a true likeness of Byron. Leigh 
Hunt's, I think, is more faithful than Moore's. 
Moore never forgot that his friend was a lord, and 
seemed to feel that he was paying himself a side 
compliment in writing a life of him. I always 
imagine Moore's portrait of Byron with an ** I am, my 
dear Moore, yours, etc.,'' written under it, as a 
specimen of his autography. But to our poet. You 
have given me a touch of his pathos ; let me hear 
some of the humor which you have commended so 
highly. 

PHILIP. 

Praise beforehand deadens the flavor of the wine ; 
so that, if you are disappointed, the blame must be 
laid upon me. I will read you a few passages from 
his '' Nun's Priest's Tale." It has been modernized 
by Dryden, under the title of " The Cock and the 
Fox ; " but he has lost much of the raciness of the 
original. I have chosen this tale because it will, at 
the same time, give you an idea of his minute obser- 



28 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

vation of nature. The story begins with a description 
of the poor widow who owns the hero of the story. 
Sir Chaunticlere. Then we have a glimpse of the 
hero himself. The widow has 

'' A yard enclosed all about 
With sticks, and also a dry ditch without, 
In which she had a cock hight Chaunticlere ; 
In 'all the land for voice was not his peer; 
Not merrier notes the merry organ plays 
Within the churches, upon holydays ; 
And surer was his crowing in his lodge 
Than is a clock, or abbey horologe : 
He knew by nature every step to trace 
Of the equinoctial in his native place. 
And, when fifteen degrees it had ascended, 
Then crew he so as might not be amended. 
His comb was redder than the fine corall. 
Embattled as it were a castle-wall ; 
His bill was black, and like the jet it shone ; 
Like azure were his legs and toes each one ; 
His nails were white as lilies in the grass. 
And like the burned gold his color was." 

JOHN. 

What gusto ! If he had been painting Arthur or 
Charlemagne, he would not have selected his colors 
with more care. Without pulling out a feather from 
his hero's cockhood, he contrives to give him a 
human interest. How admirable is the little humor- 
ous thrust at the astronomers, too, in restricting Sir 
Chaunticlere's knowledge of the heavenly motions to 
his own village ! 



CHAUCER, 



29 



PHILIP. 

Yes, Chaucer has the true poet's heart. One thing 
is as precious to him in point of beauty as another. 
He would have described his lady's cheek by the 
same flower to which he has here likened the toes of 
Chaunticlere. To go on with our story, 

'* This gentle cock had in his governance 
Seven wifely hens to do him all pleasaunce, 
Of whom the fairest-colored in the throat 
Was known as the fair damsel Partelote ; 
Courteous she was, discreet and debonair, 
Companionable, and bore herself so fair, 
Sithence the hour she was a seven-night old, 
That truly she the royal heart did hold 
Of Chaunticlere bound fast in every limb: 
He loved her so that it was well with him : 
But such a joy it was to hear them sing. 
When that the bright sun in the east 'gan spring, 
In sweet accord ! " 

Chaunticlere, one morning, awakens his fair wife 
Partelote by a dreadful groaning ; and, on her ask- 
ing the cause, informs her that it must have been the 
effect of a bad dream he had been haunted by. 

** I dreamed, that, as I roamed up and down, 
Within our yard, I there beheld a beast, 
Like to a hound, that would have made arrest 
Upon my body, and have had me dead. 
His color 'twixt a yellow was and red. 
And tipped was his tail and both his ears 
With black, unlike the remnant of his hairs. 
His snout was small, and glowing were his eyes : 
Still, for his look, the heart within me dies." 



30 



FIRST CONVERSATION, 



Partelote treats his fears with scorn. She asks 
indignantly, 



*' How durst you now for shame say to your love, 
That anything could make you feel afeard ? 
Have you no manly heart, yet have a beard ? " 

She then gives him a lecture on the physiological 
causes of dreams, hints at a superfluity of bile, and 
recommends some simple remedy which her own 
housewifely skill can concoct from herbs that grow 
within the limits of his own manor. She also quotes 
Cato's opinion of the small faith to be put in dreams. 
Her lord, who does not seem superior to the com- 
mon prejudice against having his wife make too 
liberal a display of her learning, replies by over- 
W'helming her with an avalanche of weighty authori- 
ties, each one of which, he tells her, is worth more 
than ever Cato was. He concludes with a contempt- 
uous defiance of all manner of doses, softening it 
toward his lady by an adroit compliment. 

'* But let us speak of mirth, and stint of this : 
Dame Partelote, as I have hope of bliss, 
Of one thing God hath sent me largest grace ; 
For, when I see the beauty of your face, 
You are so scarlet red about your eyes, 
That, when I look on you, my terror dies ; 
For just so sure as in pruicipio 
Mulier est hominis confusio^ 
(Madam, the meaning of this Latin is, 
Woman is man's chief joy and sovereign bliss,) 
Whene'er I feel at night your downy side, 
I am so full of solace and of pride, 



CHA UCER. 3 I 

That I defy the threatenings of my dream: 

And, with that word, he flew down from the beam, — 

For it was day, — and eke his spouses all ; 

And wuth a chuck he 'gan them for to call, 

For he had found a corn lay in the yard : 

Royal he was, and felt no more afeard ; 

He looketh as a lion eyes his foes, 

And roameth up and down upon his toes ; 

Scarcely he deigneth set his feet to ground ; 

He chucketh when a kernel he hath found. 

And all his wives run to him at his call." 

JOHN. 

What an admirable barn-yard picture ! The very 
chanticleer of our childhood, whose parallel Bucks 
county and Dorking have striven in vain to satisfy 
our maturer vision with ! A chanticleer whose mem- 
ory writes Ichabod upon the most populous and pala- 
tial fowl-houses of manhood ! Chaucer's Pegasus 
ambles along as easily, and crops the grass and 
daisies of the roadside as contentedly, as if he had 
forgotten his wings. 

PHILIP. 

Yes, the work in hand is, for the time, noblest in 
the estimation of our poet. His eye never looks be- 
yond it, or cheats it of its due regard by pining for 
something fairer and more worthy. The royalty is 
where he is, whether in hovel or palace. Nothing 
that God has not thought it beneath him to make 
does he deem it beneath him to study and prove 
worthy of all admiration. Wordsworth is like him 
in this. 



32 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

JOHN. 

True, but in Wordsworth the faculty was a con- 
scious acquisition, while in Chaucer it was an in- 
born gift. Wordsworth attained to it analytically, 
and so became a philosopher. Chaucer is always a 
poet. 

PHILIP. 

« 

The artificial style of writing, which tyrannized 
when Wordsworth first became sensible of his own 
powers, so disgusted him as to warp his inborn 
poetical faith into a fanaticism. That which should 
have retained the flexile sensibility of a feeling be- 
came stiffened into a theory. He has beheld nature 
through a loophole, whence he could see but on one 
side of him, though the view was broad and majestic. 
His eye has glorified whatever it looked upon, and 
the clod and the bramble have shared equally in 
transfiguration with the mountain and the forest. 
The cloud which the sun's alchemy transmutes to 
gold is, perhaps, not more grateful for that light 
than the smallest grass-blade which he shines upon, 
but the eye reaps a richer harvest of consolement 
from it. I cannot look the gift-horse in the mouth, 
especially when he is the true steed of the Muses, 
but I should have been more grateful to Wordsworth 
for a larger bunch of lilies and less darnel. Yet his 
reducing the movements of his poetical nature to a 
principle, if it has straitened his revenues from 
some sources, has not been without its rewards also. 
It gave surety and precision to his eye, so that it 



CHAUCER, 33 

looked at once through all outward wrappages to the 
very life and naked reality of things, and he has 
added more to our household words than any other 
poet since Shakspeare. Most of his work is solid, of 
the true Cyclopean build. There is no stucco about 
it, and it will bear the rudest weather of time. Of 
his defects 

** Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa." 

Chaucer reminds me oftenest of Crabbe, in the 
unstudied plainness of his sentiment, and the mi- 
nuteness of his descriptions. But in Crabbers 
poetry Tyburn tree is seen looming up in the dis- 
tance, and the bell of the parish workhouse is heard 
ringing. It had been better for Crabbe if he had 
studied Chaucer more and Pope less. The frigid 
artificiality of his verse often contrasts almost ludi- 
crously with the rudeness of his theme. It is Cap- 
tain Kidd in a starched cambric neckcloth and white 
gloves. When Chaucer describes his Shipman, we 
seem to smell tar. 

*' There also was a Shipman from far West ; 
For aught I know, in Dartmouth he abode ; 
Well as he could upon a hack he rode, 
All in a shirt of tow-cloth to the knee ; 
A dagger hanging by a lace had he, 
About his neck, under his arm adown ; 
The summer's heat had made his hue all brown. 
He was a right good fellow certainly, 
And many a cargo of good wine had he 
Run from Bordeaux while the exciseman slept ; 



*^ 



34 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

Of a nice conscience no great care he kept, 
If that he fought and had the upper hand, 
By water he sent them home to every land ; 
But in his craft to reckon well the tides, 
The deep sea currents, and the shoals besides, 
The sun's height and the moon's, and pilotage, — 
There was none such from Hull unto Carthage ; 
Hardy he was and wise, I undertake ; 
His beard had felt full many a tempest's shake ; 
He knew well all the havens as they were 
From Gothland to the Cape de Finisterre, 
And every creek in Brittany and Spain ; 
His trusty bark was named the Magdelaine." 

JOHN. 

The ' ' savage Rosa '' never dashed the lights and 
shades upon one of his bandits with more bold and 
picturesque effect. How that storm -grizzled beard 
stands out from the canvas ! The effect is so real 
that it seems as if the brown old sea-king had sat for 
his portrait, and that every stroke of the brush had 
been laid on within reach of the dagger hanging at 
his side. Witness the amiable tints thrown in here 
and there, to palliate a grim wrinkle or a shaggy 
eyebrow. The poet takes care to tell us that 

'^ He was a right good fellow certainly," 

lest his sitter take umbrage at the recital of his 
smuggling exploits in the next verse. And then 
with what a rough kind of humor he lets us into the 
secret of his murderous propensities, by hinting that 
he gave a passage home by water to those of whom 



CHAUCER, 35 

he got the upper hand. In spite of the would-be 
good-humored leer, the cut-throat look shows through. 
It may be very pleasant riding with him as far as 
Canterbury, and we might even laugh at his clumsi- 
ness in the saddle, but we feel all the while that we 
had rather not be overhauled by him upon the high 
seas. His short and easy method of sending ac- 
quaintances thus casually made to their respective 
homes, by water, we should not be inclined to ad- 
mire so much as he himself would ; especially if, as a 
preliminary step, he should attempt to add to the 
convenience of our respiratory organs with that ugly 
dagger of his, by opening a larger aperture some- 
where nearer to the lungs. We should be inclined 
to distrust those extraordinary powers of natation for 
which he would give us credit. Even Lord Byron, I 
imagine, would dislike to mount that steed that 
*' knew its rider"' so well, or even to '• lay his hand 
upon its mane,^' if our friend, the Shipman, held the 
stirrup. 

PHILIP. 

The whole prologue to the Canterbury Tales is 
equally admirable, but there is not time for me to 
read the whole. You must do that for yourself. I 
only give you a bunch or two of grapes. To enjoy 
the fruit in its perfection, you must go into the vine- 
yard yourself and pluck it with the bloom on, before 
the flavor of the sunshine has yet faded out of it ; 
enjoying the play of light upon the leaves also, and 
the apt disposition of the clusters, each lending a 
grace to the other. 



36 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

JOHN. 

Your metaphor pleases me. I like the grapes 
better than the wine which is pressed out of them, 
and they seem to me a fitting emblem of Chaucer's 
natural innocence. Elizabeth Barrett, a woman 
whose genius I admire, says very beautifully of 
Chaucer, 

** Old Chaucer, with his infantine, 
Familiar clasp of things divine, 
That stain upon his lips is wine J* "^ 

I had rather think it pure grape-juice. The first two 
lines take hold of my heart so that I believe them 
intuitively, and doubt not but my larger acquaintance 
with Chaucer will prove them to be true. 

PHILIP. 

I admire them as much as you do, and to me they 
seem to condense all that can be said of Chaucer. 
But one must know him thoroughly to feel their 
truth and fitness fully. At the first glimpse you get 
of his face, you are struck with the merry twinkle of 
his eye, and the suppressed smile upon his lips, 
which betrays itself as surely as a child in playing 
hide-and-seek. It is hard to believe that so happy a 
spirit can have ever felt the galling of that 

*' Chain wherewith we are darkly bound," 

or have beaten its vain wings against the insensible 
gates of that awful mystery whose key can never be 
enticed from the hand of the warder, Death. But 
presently the broad, quiet forehead, the look of 



CHA UCER, 



37 



patient earnestness, and the benignant reverence of 
the slightly bowed head, make us quite forget the 
lightsome impression of our first look. Yet in the 
next moment it comes back upon us again more 
strongly than ever. Humor is always a main in- 
gredient in highly poetical natures. It is almost 
always the superficial indication of a rich vein of 
pathos, nay, of tragic feeling, below. Wordsworth 
seems to be an exception. Yet there is a gleam of 
it in his sketch of that philosopher 

'' Who could peep and botanize 
Upon his mother's grave," 

and of a grim, reluctant sort in some parts of Peter 
Bell and the Wagoner. But he was glad to sink a 
shaft beneath the surface, where he could gather the 
more precious ore, and dwell retired from the jeers 
of a boorish world. In Chaucer's poetry, the humor 
is playing all the time round the horizon, like heat- 
lightning. It is unexpected and unpredictable, but 
as soon as you turn away from watching for it, 
behold, it flashes again as innocently and softly as 
ever. It mingles even with his pathos, sometimes. 
The laughing eyes of Thalia gleam through the tragic 
mask she holds before her face. In spite of your 
cold-water prejudices, I must confess that I like 
Miss Barrett's third line as well as the others. But 
while we are wandering so far from the poor old 
widow's yard, that fox, " full of iniquity," 

** That new Iscariot, new Ganelon," 
That false dissimulator, Greek Sinon," 



38 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

as Chaucer calls him, may have made clean away 
with our noble friend Sir Chaunticlere. 

JOHN. 

Now, Esculapius defend thy bird ! The Romans 
believed that the lion himself would strike his colors 
at the crowing of a cock, — a piece of natural history 
to which the national emblems of England and 
France have figuratively given the lie. But cunning 
is often more serviceable than bravery, and Sir 
Russel the fox may achieve by diplomacy the victory 
to which the lion was not equal. 

PHILIP. 

We shall see. Diplomatists are like the two Yan- 
kees who swapped jackknives together till each had 
cleared five dollars. Such a Sir Philip Sidney among 
cocks, at least, could not fall without a burst of 
melodious tears from every civilized barn-yard. The 
poet, after lamenting that Sir Chaunticlere had not 
heeded better the boding of his dream, w^arns us of 
the danger of woman^s counsel from Eve's time 
downward ; but takes care to add, 

*^ These speeches are the cock's, and none of mine ; 
For I no harm of woman can divine." 

He then returns to his main argument ; and no one 
who has not had poultry for bosom-friends from 
childhood can appreciate the accurate grace and 
pastoral humor of his descriptions. The fox, mean- 
while, has crept into the yard and hidden himself. 



CHAUCER. 39 

'' Fair in the sand, to bathe her merrily, 
Lies Partelote, and all her sisters by, 
Against the sun, and Chaunticlere so free 
Sang merrier than the mermaid in the sea 
(For Physiologus saith certainly 
How that they sing both well and merrily), 
And so befell, that, as he cast his eye 
Among the worts upon a butterfly, 
'Ware was he of the fox that lay full low ; 
Nothing it lists him now to strut or crow, 
But cries anon, cuk ! cuk ! and up doth start, 
As one that is aff rayed in his heart." 

The knight would have fled, as there are examples 
enough in Froissart to prove it would not have dis- 
graced his spurs to do, considering the greatness 
of the odds against him, but the fox plies him with 
courteous flattery. He appeals to Sir Chaunticlere's 
pride of birth, pretends to have a taste in music, and 
is desirous of hearing him sing, hoping all the while to 
put his tuneful throat to quite other uses. A more 
bitter fate than that of Orpheus seems to be in store 
for our feathered son of Apollo, since his spirit, 
instead of hastening to join that of his Eurydice, 
must rake for corn in Elysian fields, with the bitter 
thought that not one but seven Eurydices are 
cackling for him " superis in auris^ The fox 

*' Says, * Gentle Sir, alas ! what will you do ? 
Are you afraid of him that is your friend ? 
Now certes, I were worse than any fiend, 
If I to you wished harm or villany ; 
I am not come your counsel to espy. 



40 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

But truly all that me did hither bring 

Was only for to hearken how you sing, 

For, on my word, your voice is merrier even 

Than any angel hath that is in heaven. 

And you beside a truer feeling show, Sir, 

Than did Boece, or any great composer ; 

My Lord, your father (God his spirit bless ! 

And eke your mother, for her gentleness) 

Have honored my poor house to my great ease, 

And, certes, Sir, full fain would I you please. 

But, since men talk of singing I will say 

(Else may I lose my eyes this very day), 

Save you, I never heard a mortal sing 

As did your father at the day-breaking; 

Certes, it was with all his heart he sung. 

And, for to make his voice more full and strong, 

He would so pain him, that with either eye. 

He needs must wink, so loud he strove to cry. 

And stand upon his tiptoes therewithal, 

And stretch his comely neck forth long and small. 

Discretion, too, in him went hand in hand 

With music, and no man in any land 

In wisdom or in song did him surpass.' " 

JOHN. 

I thought Chaucer's portrait of the son perfect, till 
Sir Russel hung up his of the father beside it. Why, 
Vandyke himself would look chalky beside such flesh 
and blood as this. Such a cock, one would think, 
might have served a score of Israelites for a sacrifice 
at their feast of atonement, or have been a sufficient 
thank-offering to the gods for twenty Spartan vic- 
tories. Stripped of his feathers, Plato would have 



CHA UCER, 4 1 

taken him for something more than human. It must 
have been such a one as this that the Stoics esteemed 
it as bad as parricide to slay.^ 

PHILIP. 

The fox continues, 

*^ ' Let 's see, can you your father counterfeit? ' 
This Chaunticlere his wings began to beat. 
As one that could not his foul treason spy, 
So was he ravished by his flattery. 

. • • • • 

Sir Chaunticlere stood high upon his toes, 
Stretched forth his neck and held his eyes shut close, 
And 'gan to crow full loudly for the nonce, 
When Dan Russel, the fox, sprang up at once, 
And by the gorget seized Sir Chaunticlere, 
And on his back toward the wood him bare." 

Forthwith the seven wives begin a sorrowful 
ululation ; Dame Partelote, in her capacity as favor- 
ite, shrieking more sovereignly than the rest. An- 
other Andromache, she sees her Hector dragged 
barbarously from the walls of his native Ilium, whose 
defence and prop he had ever been. Then follows a 
picture which surpasses even Hogarth. 

'' The luckless widow and her daughters two, 
Hearing the hens cry out and make their woe, 
Out at the door together rushed anon. 
And saw how toward the wood the fox is gone, 
Bearing upon his back the cock away ; 
They cried, 'Out, out, alas! and welaway! 

1 Cicero, Orat. pro L. Muraena, § XXIX. 



42 



FIRST CONVERSATION. 

Aha, the fox ! ' and after him they ran, 

And, snatching up their staves, ran many a man ; 

Ran Col the dog, ran Talbot and Gerland, 

And Malkin, with her distaff in her hand ; 

Ran cow and calf, and even the very hogs, 

So frightened with the barking of the dogs, 

And shouting of the men and women eke, 

Ran till they thought their very hearts would break. 

And yelled as never fiends in hell have done ; 

The ducks screamed, thinking that their sand was run ; 

The geese, for fear, flew cackling o'er the trees ; 

Out of their hive buzzed forth a swarm of bees ; 

So hideous was the noise, ah, benedicite ! 

Certes, not Jack Straw and his varleboy 

Raised ever any outcry half so shrill, 

When they some fleming were about to kill, 

As that same day was made about the fox : 

Vessels of brass they brought forth and of box. 

And horns and bones, on which they banged and blew ; 

It seemed the very sky would split in two. 

• • • • • 

The cock who lay upon the fox's back. 

In all his dread unto his captor spake. 

And said; ' Most noble Sir, if I were you, 

I would (as surely as God's help I sue) 

Cry, Turn again, ye haughty villains all ! 

A very pestilence upon you fall ! 

Now I am come unto the forest's side, 

Maugre your heads, the cock shall here abide ; 

I will him eat, i' faith, and that anon.' 

Answered the fox, ' Good sooth, it shall be done !' 

And, as he spake the word, all suddenly, 

The cock broke from his jaws deliverly. 

And high upon a tree he flew anon. 



CHAUCER, 43 

And when the fox saw that the cock was gone, 

' Alas ! O Chaunticlere, alas ! ' quoth he, 

' I have, 't is true, done you some injury. 

In that I made you for a while afeard. 

By seizing you from forth your native yard ; 

But, Sir, I did it with no ill intent ; 

Come down, and I will tell you what I meant, 

God help me as I speak the truth to you ! ' 

' Nay,' quoth the other, ' then, beshrew us two, 

But first beshrew myself both blood and bones, 

If thou beguile me oftener than once ; 

Never again shalt thou by flattery 

Make me to sing and wink the while mine eye ; 

For he that winketh, when he most should see, 

Deserves no help from Providence, pardie.' " 

JOHN. 

So our friend Sir Chaunticlere escapes, after all. 
The humorous moral of the story is heightened by 
the cunning Reynard's being foiled with his own 
weapons. The bare fact of enduing animals with 
speech and other human properties is, in itself, 
highly ludicrous. Fables always inculcate magna- 
nimity. To see our weaknesses thus palpably bodied 
forth in their appropriate animal costume brings 
them down from the false elevation to which their 
association with ourselves had raised them. The 
next time we meet them in life, their human diguise 
drops off, and the ape or the owl takes our own place 
or that of our friend. That treatise of Baptista 
Portals, in which he traces the likeness between 
men's faces and those of animals, is painful and 



44 



FIRST CONVERSATION, 



shocking ; but when we casually note a human ex- 
pression in the countenance of a brute, it is merely 
laughable. In the former instance the mind is 
carried downward, and in the latter upward. To 
children there is nothing humorous in ^sop. They 
read his fables as soberly as they afterwards read 
Scott's novels. The moral is always skipped, as 
tedious. The honey-bag is all they seek ; the sting 
is of no use, save to the bee. Yet afterwards we 
find that Lucian and Rabelais are dull beside ^sop ; 
and the greater the seeming incongruity, the greater 
the mirth. 

PHILIP. ' 

Chaucer was aware of this when he put so much 
pedantry into the mouth of Chaunticlere ; and the 
fox's allusion to Boethius makes me laugh in spite 
of myself. Chaunticlere's compliment to Dame Par- 
telote, too, where he expresses the intense satisfac- 
tion which he feels in observing that 

" She is so scarlet red about her eyes," 

is the keenest of satires upon those lovers who have 
sung the bodily perfections of their mistresses, and 
who have set their affections, as it were, upon this 
year's leaves, to fall off with them at the bidding of 
the first November blast of fortune. It was a Platonic 
notion, to which Spenser gave in his allegiance, that 
a fair spirit always chose a fair dwelling, and beauti- 
fied it the more by its abiding. It is the sweetest 
apology ever invented for a physical passion. But I 
do not like this filching of arrows from heavenly love. 



CHAUCER, 



45 



to furnish forth the quiver of earthly love withal. 
Love is the most hospitable of spirits, and adorns 
the interior of his home for the nobler welcome, not 
the exterior for the more lordly show. It is not the 
outside of his dwelling that invites, but the soft 
domestic murmur stealing out at the door, and the 
warm, homely light gushing from the windows. No 
matter into what hovel of clay he enters, that is 
straightway the palace, and beauty holds her court 
in vain. I doubt if Chaucer were conscious of his 
sarcasm, but I can conceive of no more cutting 
parody than a sonnet of Chaunticlere's upon his 
mistress's comb or beak, or other gallinaceous ex- 
cellency. Imagine him enthusiastic over her sagacity 
in the hunting of earthworms, and her grace in 
scratching for them with those toes 

*^ White as lilies in the grass," 

standing upon one leg as he composed a quatrain 
upon her tail-feathers, and finally losing himself in 
the melodious ecstasy of her cackle ! 

There is certainly, as you have said, something 
ludicrous in the bare idea of animals endued with 
human propensities and feelings, and the farther 
away we get from any physical resemblance, the 
more keenly moved is our sense of humor. That 
king-making jelly of the bees strips Nicholas and 
Victoria of their crowns and ermine, and makes 
them merely forked radishes, like the rest of us. 
And when I learned that there was domestic slavery 
among certain species of the ants, I could not but 



46 FIJ^ST CONVERSATION, 

laugh, as I imagined some hexapodal McDuffie 
mounted upon a cherry-stone, and convincing a 
caucus of chivalrous listeners of their immense su- 
periority to some neighboring hill, whose inhabi- 
tants got in their own harvest of bread-crumbs and 
dead beetles, unaided by that patriarchal machinery. 

JOHN. 

The passage you first read me from the death scene 
of Arcite moved me so much that I cannot help wish- 
ing you would read me something more in the same 
kind. 

PHILIP. 

I were no true lover if I were to express any fear 
of your being disappointed. Yet I know not if you 
and I shall be equally pleased. The very gnarliest 
and hardest of hearts has some musical strings in it. 
But they are tuned differently in every one of us, so 
that the selfsame strain, which wakens a thrill of 
sympathetic melody in one, may leave another quite 
silent and untouched. For whatever I love, my 
delight mounts to an extravagance. There are 
verses which I cannot read without tears of exulta- 
tion which to others are merely indifferent. Those 
simple touches, scattered here and there by all great 
writers, which make me feel that I, and every most 
despised and outcast child of God that breathes, have 
a common humanity with those glorious spirits, over- 
power me. Poetry has a key which unlocks some 
more inward cabinet of my nature than is accessible 
to any other power. I cannot explain it, or account 



CHA UCER. 47 

for it, or say what faculty it appeals to. The chord 
which vibrates strongly becomes blurred and invisible 
in proportion to the intensity of its impulse. Often 
the mere rhyme, the cadence and sound of the words, 
awaken this strange feeling in me. Not only do all 
the happy associations of my earthly life, that before 
lay scattered, take beautiful shapes, like iron dust at 
the approach of the magnet ; but something dim and 
vague, beyond these, moves itself in me, with the 
uncertain sound of a far-oif sea. My sympathy with 
remotest eld becomes that of a bystander and an 
actor. Those noble lines of Shakspeare, in one of 
his sonnets, drop their veil of mysticism, and become 
modern and ordinary : 

'* No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change : 
Thy pyramids, built up with newer might, 
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange ; 
They are but dressings of a former sight." 

The grand symphony of Wordsworth's Ode rolls 
through me, and I tremble, as the air does with the 
gathering thunders of the organ. My clay seems to 
have a sympathy with the mother earth whence it 
was taken, to have a memory of all that our orb has 
ever witnessed of great and noble, of sorrowful 
and glad. With the wise Samian, I can touch the 
mouldering buckler of Euphorbus and claim an in- 
terest in it deeper than that of its antiquity. I have 
been the bosom friend of Leander and of Romeo. I 
seem to go behind Musaeus and Shakspeare, and to 
get my intelligence at first hand. Sometimes, in my 



48 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

sorrow, a line from Spenser steals in upon my memory 
as if by some vitality and external volition of its own, 
like a blast from the distant trump of a knight pricking 
toward the court of Faerie, and I am straightway 
lifted out of that sadness and shadow into the sun- 
shine of a previous and long-agone experience. Often, 
too, this seemingly lawless species of association over- 
comes me with a sense of sadness. Seeing a water- 
fall or a forest for the first time, I have a feeling of 
something gone, a vague regret, that, in some former 
state, I have drank up the wine of their beauty, and 
left to the defrauded present only the muddy lees. 
Yet again, what divine over-compensation, when 
the same memory (shall I call it ?), or phantasy, lets 
fall a drop of its invisible elixir into my cup, and I 
behold to-day, which before showed but forlorn and 
beggared, clothed in the royal purple, and with the 
golden sceptre of a line of majestical ancestry ! 

JOHN. 

If I do not understand all that you say, I can at 
least prove my superiority to vulgar prejudice by 
believing in your sincerity. A base mind always 
takes that for cant in another which would be such 
in itself, and is apt to blame any innocent assertion 
of peculiarity for assumption. Yet, in fact, what is 
peculiar to any one is not only all that is of worth in 
him, but is also the most likely to be showing itself 
on all occasions. Poetry does not convey the same 
impressions to my mind as to yours, but other 
things have sometimes given me a feeling akin to 
what you describe. 



CHAUCER, 



PHILIP. 



49 



When you speak thus of poetry, you restrict it to 
what has been written by the poets, which is but a 
small part of it yet. In attributing a certain mystical 
influence to peculiar associations, I said more than I 
meant to have done. But it is better to say more 
than less and if I err may it always be rather upon 
the side of confidence than of suspicion. I intended 
to imply that our tastes are so arbitrary as entirely 
to forbid the establishment of a code of criticism. I 
doubt if any better reasoning can be given for our 
likings than the Latin poet gave for his dislikes. 
We can assert them, but when we strive to explain 
and apologize for them, we are quite likely to lose 
ourselves in a mire of cant and conventionality. It 
may be said that it is truth in every case that de- 
lights us ; but the next question is Pilate's, '' What 
is truth ? " It is a different thing (let me rather say 
it assumes a different aspect) to each of us, and thus 
is equally amiable to all. How shall we explain it? 
Here is a man who is a scholar and an artist, who 
knows precisely how every effect has been produced 
by every great writer that ever lived, and who is re- 
solved to reproduce them. But the heart passes by 
his pitfalls and traps and carefully planned springes, 
to be taken captive by some simple fellow, who 
expected the event as little as did his prisoner. The 
critics fix upon one writer as a standard, and content 
themselves for a century or two with measuring every- 
body else by him. They justly enough consider that 



50 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

criticijsm should be conservative ; but their idea of 
conservatism is that of a Fakir, who deems it religion 
to stand upon one leg till all its muscles become 
palsied and useless. In the course of time, their 
system, if it ever had vitality, becomes effete. If 
they commend Hercules, it is for his skill at Om- 
phale's distaif, till the delightful impropriety of their 
criticism gets them laughed off the stage. The truth 
is that the only safe method is to point out what 
parts of a poem please the critic, and to let the rest 
go. Posterity will reverse our judgments ninety-nine 
times in the hundred, and it is certainly better to be 
censured for kindness than for severity. If the poets 
have not been dull, they have at least been the 
causes of a lavish prodigality of dulness in other men. 
Taste is the next gift to genius. They are the Eros 
and Anteros of Art. Without his brother, the first 
must remain but a child still. Poets are vulgarly 
considered deficient in the reasoning faculty ; whereas 
none was ever a great poet, without having it in 
excess, and after a century or two men become 
convinced of it. They jump the middle terms of 
their syllogisms, it is true, and assume premises to 
which the world has not yet arrived ; but time stamps 
their deductions as invincible. Taste is that faculty 
which at once perceives, and hails as true, ideas 
which yet it has not the gift of discovering itself. It 
is not something to be educated and fostered, but is as 
truly innate as the creative faculty itself. A man with 
what is blunderingly called an educated taste is inca- 
pable of aught but the classic ; that is, he recognizes 



CHA UCER. 5 I 

in a new work that which makes the charm of an old 
one, and pronounces it worthy of admiration accord- 
ingly. Put the right foot of the Apollo forward 
instead of the left, and call it Philip of Pokanoket, 
and he is in ecstasies over a work at once so truly 
national and classic. He would have stood dumb, 
and with an untouched heart, before the Apollo fresh 
from the chisel of the sculptor. 

JOHN. 

Very likely. This faculty of taste, which I agree 
with you in thinking innate, is the first great requisite 
of a critic. Learning, ingenuity, and boldness are 
merely its handmaidens. Our critics have been in- 
teresting in one regard ; they have experimentally 
demonstrated how long a man will live after the 
brains are out. This aspect, however, is for the 
physiologists. No critic that ever lived would have 
the hardihood to foretell the precise hues of to-mor- 
row^s sunset, and then to complain if it gave him an 
acre of purple and gold more or less. Yet the same 
man would confidently reduce Art to a chessboard, 
upon which all the combinations are mathematically 
calculable and exhaustible, and compel genius, whose 
very essence is freedom, to confine itself to these 
little arbitrary squares of black and white. 

PHILIP. 

And yet the next development of Genius is as 
unpredictable as the glory of the next sunset. The 
critics tell us the day for epics has gone by. Wait 
till the master comes, and see. Everything is im- 



52 



FIRST CONVERSATION. 



possible till it is done ; and when the 7nan has come 
and accomplished his work, the world says, Am I 
thousands of years old, to be gravelled in my horn- 
book? The world has been to blame in this matter. 
It has allowed those to be critics who were unfit for 
anything else. Criticism has been the manor and 
glebe of those who had no other inheritance, as the 
church used to be to the younger sons of the aristocracy 
in England. And the lion's hide of anonymousness, 
through which only the judicious catch sight of the 
betraying ears, has often indued Zo'ilus with a terror 

not his own. 

JOHN. 

After all, they have only interfered with the larder 
of Genius. They keep it upon a spare diet, that it 
may sup the more heartily with the Muses. Hunger 
has wrenched many a noble deed from men ; but 
there is a corrupting leaven of self in all that Ambi- 
tion can caress out of them, which soon turns it quite 
stale and musty, hnpletus venter non vult studere 
lib enter was the old monkish jingle, and let us be 
grateful in due measure to the critics who have made 
the poets unwillingly illustrate it. 

PHILIP. 

Surely, you jest. A greasy savor of the kitchen 
intrudes itself into whatever is done for the belly's 
sake. No. What a man pays for bread and butter 
is worth its market value, and no more. What he 
pays for Love's sake is gold indeed, which has a lure 
for angels' eyes, and rings well upon God's touch- 



CHA UCER. 



53 



stone. And it is love that has inspired all true 
hearts. This is the ample heritage of the poets, and 
it is of this they have made us heirs. When the true 
poet is born, a spirit becomes incarnate which can 
embrace the whole rude earth as with the soft arms 
of a glorifying atmosphere. The inarticulate moan 
of the down-trodden he shall clothe in language, and 
so wing it with divine music that the dullest heart 
shall look up to see it knocking at heaven's gates. 
The world's joy, erewhile a leaden cloud, shall turn 
golden under his sunlike look. And when such a 
spirit comes forth from its heavenly palace, where it 
had been wrapped softly in the imperial purple of 
noble purposes and happy dreams, and tended by all 
the majestical spirits of the past, — when it comes 
forth in obedience to the beckonings of these its benig- 
nant guardians, saying, " Behold, my brethren are 
ahungered and I will feed them ; they are athirst and I 
will give them drink ; my plenty is for them, else is 
it beggary and starving," ana is jeered at and flouted 
because it can speak only the tongue of the heaven 
whence it came, now foreign and obsolete, what be- 
wildering bitterness, what trembling even to the deep 
God ward bases of faith, what trustfulness mocked 
into despair, become its portion ! The love, the 
hope, the faith, which it had sent out before it to 
bring it tidings of the fair land of promise, come 
back pale and weary, and cry for food in vain to the 
famishing heart which once so royally entertained 
them. The beautiful humanity, a vision of which had 
braced the sinews of its nature, and had made all 



54 



FIRST CONVERSATION', 



things the vassals of its monarch eye, seems to it now 
but as a sphinx, from whose unchangeable and stony 
orbs it can win no look of recognition, and whose 
granite lips move not at its despairing cry. You 
smile, but let me think it is for sympathy. A sneer 
is the weapon of the weak. Like other deviPs 
weapons, it is always cunningly ready to our hand, 
and there is more poison in the handle than in the 
point. But how many noble hearts have writhed 
with its venomous stab, and festered with its subtle 
malignity ! 

JOHN. 

Yet, from some of its hurts a celestial ichor flows, 
as from a wounded god. I would hardly change the 
sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. 
Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow 
the tenser for it, and ring even the clearer and more 
ravishingly. We may be but the chance acquaint- 
ance of him who has made us the sharer of his joy, 
but he who has admitted us to the sanctuary of his 
grief has made us partakers also of the dignity of 
friendship. Sorrow, you will allow, if not scorn or 
neglect, is a good schoolmaster for poets. Why, it 
has wrenched one couplet of true poetry out of Dr. 
Johnson. 

PHILIP. 

You mean that one in his " Vanity of Human 
Wishes,'^ 

'' There mark what ills the scholar's life assail, 
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail." 



CHAUCER. 55 

You might have instanced, too, his letter to Lord 
Chesterfield, though it be not in verse. But ill- 
fortune, if it bring out the poetry of a prosaic nature, 
will but deaden a highly poetical one. 

JOHN. 

You agreed with me in my praise of Elizabeth 
Barrett's lines ; can you give me an illustration of 
Chaucer's 

** Infantine, 
Familiar clasp of things divine ' ' ? 

PHILIP. 

It would be difficult. An author's piety cannot be 
proved from the regular occurrence of certain de- 
corums and respectabilities of religion in his works, 
but from a feeling which permeates the whole. I 
have read books in which the name , God was 
never once so much as alluded to ; Vv .irre- 

sistibly persuaded me of the writer's fait- *'-H 

childlike love of him. And I have ■ 
where that blessed name, with a parenti 
systematic piety, made part of every sent* ; 
only impressed me like the constantly n* 
figures upon calico. There is no intentiona 
about Chaucer, no French collar-and-wristband > 
rality, too common in our day. Now, certain da_y 
of the week, and certain men, seem to claim a mo- 
nopoly in religion. It is something quite too costly 
and precious to make part of every day's furniture. 
We must not carry it into the street or the market, 
lest it get soiled. We doff it and hang it up as 



56 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

easily as a Sunday suit. The ancients esteemed it 
sacrilege to touch what was set apart for the gods. 
Many of our own time imitate that ethnic scrupu- 
lousness, and carefully forbear religion, yet are deemed 
pious men, too. In Chaucer you will find a natural 
piety everywhere shining through, mildly and equably, 
like a lamp set in an alabaster vase. The wise man 
maintains a hospitable mind. He scruples not to 
entertain thoughts, no matter how strange and for- 
eign they may be, and to ask news of them of realms 
which he has never explored. He has no fear of 
their stirring any treason under his own roof. Chau- 
cer apparently acted upon this principle. He loved 
speculation, and when he was running down some 
theological dogma, he does not mind leaping the 
church inclosure, and pursuing his prey till it takes 
refuge unr t the cassock of the priest himself. But 
thou ^ aems not to set much store by forms and 

^'' ird observances, he is quite too near the 

nder and belief and earnestness not to be 
^ious. The earliest poetry of all countries 
I poetry, or that in which the idea of God 
ninates and is developed. The first effort at 
jh which man's nature makes in all tongues is 
J pronounce the word '* Father." Reverence is the 
foundation of all poetry. From reverence the spirit 
climbs on to love, and thence beholds all things. 
No matter in what Scythian fashion these first recog- 
nitions of something above and beyond the soul are 
uttered, they contain the germs of psalms and proph- 
ecies. Whether for a while the immortal guest 



CHAUCER. 57 

rests satisfied with a Fetish or an Apollo, it has aU 
ready grasped the clew which leads unerringly to the 
very highest idea. For reverence is the most keen- 
eyed and exacting of all the faculties, and if there 
be the least flaw in its idol, it will kneel no longer. 
From wood it rises to gold and ivory ; from these to 
the yet simpler and more majestic marble ; and, 
planting its foot upon that, it leaps upward to the in- 
finite and invisible. When I assume reverence, 
then, as the very primal essence and life of poetry, I 
claim for it a nobler stirp than it has been the fashion 
to allow it. Beyond Adam runs back its illustrious 
genealogy. It stood with Uriel in the sun, and 
looked down over the battlements of heaven with the 
angelic guards. In short, it is no other than the re- 
ligious sentiment itself. That is poetry which makes 
sorrow lovely and joy solemn to us, and reveals to 
us the holiness of things. Faith casts herself upon 
her neck as upon a sister's. She shows us what 
glimpses we get of life's spiritual face. What she 
looks on becomes miraculous, though it be but the 
dust of the wayside ; and miracles become but as 
dust for their simpleness. There is nothing noble 
without her ; with her there can be nothing mean. 
What songs the Druids sang within the sacred circuit 
of Stonehenge we can barely conjecture ; but those 
forlorn stones doubtless echoed with appeals to a 
higher something ; and are not even now without 
their sanctity, since they chronicle a nation's desire 
after God. Whether those forest-priests worshipped 
the strangely beautiful element of fire, or if the pil- 



58 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

grim Belief pitched her tent and rested for a night in 
some ruder and bleaker creed, there we may yet 
trace the light footprints of Poesy, as she led her 
sister onward to fairer fields, and streams flowing 
nearer to the oracle of God. 

JOHN. 

With you, then, the reading of any poet must 
begin, like the Romish missal, with a sursu7n cor da. 
It is no wonder that you are so sore against the 
critics, for they usually reverse the rule. The poets, 
however, have given them some reason for it. They 
have seldom been such religious teachers as I should 
wish to be guided by. Byron seems to have written 
by a redder light than usually comes from above ; and 
Milton and Burns show a very anomalous sympathy 
for that unfortunate personage whom Latimer calls 
the only bishop faithful in his diocese. 

PHILIP. 

Byron might have made a great poet. As it is, 
his poetry is the record of a struggle between his 
good and his baser nature, in which the latter wins. 
The fall is great in proportion to the height from 
which one is hurled. An originally beautiful spirit 
becomes the most degraded when perverted. It would 
fain revenge itself upon that purity from which it is 
an unhappy and restless exile, and drowns its re- 
morse in the drunkenness and vain bluster of defi- 
ance. There is a law of neutralization of forces, 
which hinders bodies from sinking beyond a certain 
depth in the sea ; but in the ocean of baseness the 



CHAUCER. 59 

deeper we get the easier is the sinking. As for the 
kindness which Mihon and Burns felt for the Devil, 
I am sure God thinks of him with pity a thousand 
times to their once, and the good Origen believed 
him not incapable of salvation. 

JOHN. 

We have forgotten Chaucer. 

PHILIP. 

We shall come to him presently. The straight 
line is not the line of beauty. There is an oak-wood 
a mile or two hence, whither I often walk, but I never 
make for it the straightforward pertinacity of a turn- 
pike. A clump of golden-rods, or a sprig of succory, 
is enough to draw me aside ; and when I reach my 
oaks, I bring to them a heart more open and a 
keener sympathy. Once there, I am not locked up 
in them, but seek out glimpses of landscape on every 
side, the enjoyment of which I seem to owe to their 
hospitality. The rustle of their leaves makes my ear 
sympathize in the happiness of my eye, and when I 
turn wholly back to them again, their shade seems 
thicker, their vistas more warmly sprinkled with sun- 
shine, and their trunks more royally mantled with 
moss. Let Chaucer be our oak-wood to-day. There 
is nothing that does not harmonize with and illustrate 
what we have most at heart, and one key will open 
all the doors of nature. No man, if he try, can enjoy 
one thing at a time ; nor can he love one thing truly, 
and be indifferent to any other the most remote. 



6o FIRST CONVERSATION. 

JOHN. 

It is a bad sign when a man is skilful in apolo- 
gies. But I shall accept your excuse, since we are 
met to converse, and not to argue. So now to 
Chaucer again. 

PHILIP. 

I am ready. But this attempting to illustrate a 
great poet by specimens is like giving an idea of 
Niagara by a bottleful of water brought thence, or 
of Wachuset by a fragment of its granite. I shall 
read you now an extract from the *' Clerk's Tale." 
It is the story of '' patient Grizzel," and interests me 
the more from his telling us that he 

*' Learned it at Padua of a worthy clerk, 
So proven by his word and by his work ; 
He is dead now, and nailed in his chest, 
I pray to God to give his soul good rest ; 
Francis Petrarch, the poet laureate, 
This scholar hight." 

JOHN. 
But was Chaucer ever in Italy ? 

PHILIP. 

It is highly probable, though not certain. It is 
not likely that Chaucer would have quoted Petrarch 
as his authority rather than Boccace, unless the fact 
be as he states it. I see no reason to doubt it. 
Beside, incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and 
gives us nothing in return. It is well to distrust 
what we hear to make us think worse of a man, and 



CHAUCER, 6 1 

to accept a story's pleasantness as prima facie evi- 
dence of its truth. 

JOHN. 

It is certainly agreeable to imagine Petrarch and 
Chaucer together ; and who knows but Boccace filled 
up the number of the classic feast ? I wonder there 
is no tradition concerning our poet's journey to Italy, 
as there is about Milton's. The graves of poets 
seem to be the natural soil out of which such sweet 
legendary flowers grow. 

PHILIP. 

The Italians would have had one. They are either 
very unscrupulous, or deficient in originality of inven- 
tion in such matters ; for precisely the same story is 
told of Tasso and Pulci, and, I think, of Ariosto. 

JOHN. 

You mean that of the bandit's dismissing them 
courteously, on learning their names. Avery Claude 
Duval of ruffians ! One finds it hard to believe in 
three such. Yet it may be true. It could never 
have happened in England or America, where the 
mass of the people know less and care less about 
their poets than in any other countries. Yet our 
native tongue boasts the greatest and most universal 
of poets. The Sicilians paid a greater compliment 
to Euripides, and Milton has immortalized Alexan- 
der's homage to the memory of Pindar. 

PHILIP. 

The story of Griselda, of course, you know already ; 
so that I shall need but a short preface to what I 



62 ' FIRST CONVERSATION. 

read. The first trial which the husband makes of 
his wife's patience is by taking away her infant daugh- 
ter (her only child), with the avowed purpose of 
having it murdered. A ** Sergeant" is sent to take 
the babe. At first Griselda is silent; 

** But at the last to speak she thus began, 
And meekly she unto the Sergeant prayed, 
(So as he was a worthy gentleman,) 
That she might kiss her child before it died : 
And in her lap the little child she laid, 
With full sad face, and 'gan the child to bliss, 
And lulled it, and after 'gan it kiss." 

JOHN. 

Very sweet and touching. I like, too, what our 
modern critics would, in all probability, find fault 
with, the frequent repetition of the word ** child." 
The poet had put himself so in the mother's place 
that any less tender epithet would not satisfy him. 
Now-a-days an author will wade round through a 
quagmire of verbiage to avoid using the same word 
over again. The old poets were more straightfor- 
ward. 

PHILIP. 

I am sorry that we have lost the use of the word 
" bliss " as a verb, so much motherliness is conveyed 
by it. 

*^ And thus she said, in her benignant voice: 
* Farewell, my child ! I shall thee never see ; 
But, since that I have marked thee with the cross, 
Of that saine father blessed may'st thou be, 



CHAUCER, 63 

Who died for us upon a cross of tree : 
Thy spirit, little child, his care I make. 
For thou this night must perish for my sake.' 

** I trow that for a nurse, in such a case. 
It had been hard this pity for to see ; 
Well might a mother, then, have cried, alas ! 
But ne'ertheless so steadfast-souled was she. 
That she endured all adversity. 
And meekly to the Sergeant there she said, 
* Take back again your little youngling maid.' 

'* ' Go now,' said she, * and do my lord's behest ; 
But one thing would I pray you of your grace, 
Unless my lord forbid you, at the least, 
Bury this little body in some place. 
Where neither birds nor beasts may it displace ' : 
But to that purpose he no word would say, 
But took the child and went upon his way." 

You are silent. 

JOHN. 

I was listening to hear the mother's tears fall upon 
the face of her child. The first voice that is heard, 
after the reading of good poetry, comes ordinarily 
from the shallowest heart in the company. Praise 
follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the 
grave ; plausibility clings to her skirts and holds her 
back, till then. I never knew a woman who thought 
well of Griselda, and I confess I would not choose 
that woman for a wife who did. Her duty as a 
mother was paramount to her duty as a wife. As is 
not uncommon, she betrayed a general principle for 
the sake of a particular one, which had fastened upon 



64 FIRST CONVERSATION, '" 

her imagination. Patience, when it is a divine thing, 
is active, not passive. Chaucer has so tenderly con- 
trived to enUst our pity as to save her from contempt. 
With what motherly endearment she repeats the word 
''little,'^ as if to move the sympathy of the stone- 
hearted Sergeant ! 

PHILIP. 

What you say reminds me of a passage in the 
'* Yorkshire Tragedy," one of the plays attributed to 
Shakspeare. I have seen it somewhere quoted as a 
proof that it was his. The touch of nature in it is 
worthy of him, but there is nothing in the rest of the 
drama to sustain the hypothesis. A spendthrift 
father, in a fit of madness, murders his children. As 
he seizes one of them, the little fellow, to appease 
him, calls himself by the name his father had doubt- 
less given him in happier days. *' O, what will you 
do, father ? / a7n yoiir white boy.'''' 

JOHN. 

That is very touching. How is it that this simple- 
ness, the very essence of tragic pathos, has become 
unattainable of late ? I know only one modern 
dramatist capable of it, though nothing would seem 
easier; I mean Robert Browning. Wordsworth has 
as deep glances now and then in his poems, but his 
tragedy of ** The Borderers" is as level as a prairie. 
There is scarce anything tragic about it, except the 
reading of it ; yet what insight has he shown in some 
parts of "The Excursion"! Among a thousand 
such passages in Shakspeare there is one which 



CHAUCER, 65 

always struck me as peculiarly fine. It is in the first 
scene of the second act of '' King John/' Queen 
Elinor says to Arthur, 

'* Come to thy grandam, child." 

Constance replies with sarcastic bitterness, and yet, I 
fancy, with hot tears in her eyes, the while, — 

'' Do, child, go to it' grandam, child ; 
Give grandam kingdom, and it' grandam will 
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig. 
There 's a good grandam." 

Who but Shakspeare would have dared this baby- 
talk in such a place ? Yet how admirable ! 

PHILIP. 

The simplest thoughts, feelings, and experiences 
that lie upon the very surface of life are overlooked 
by all but uncommon eyes. Most look upon them 
as mere weeds. Yet a weed, to him that loves it, is 
a flower ; and there are times when we would not 
part with a sprig of chickweed for a whole continent 
of lilies. No man thinks his own nature miraculous, 
while to his neighbor it may give a surfeit of wonder. 
Let him go where he will, he can find no heart so 
worth a study as his own. The prime fault of mod- 
ern poets is that they are resolved to be peculiar. 
They are not content that it should come of itself, 
but they must dig and bore for it, sinking their wells 
usually through the grave of some buried originality, 
so that if any water rises it is tainted. Read most 



66 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

volumes of poems, and you are reminded of a French 
bill of fare, where everything is a la something else. 
Even a potato an naturel is a godsend. When will 
poets learn that a grass-blade of their own raising is 
worth a barrow-load of flowers from their neighbor's 
garden? 

JOHN. 

Men ordinarily wear as many sets of borrowed 
opinions as the grave-digger in Hamlet w^ears waist- 
coats. They look quite burly till you strip them ; 
and then, too often, you find but a withered anatomy 
beneath. But, after all, borrowed garments never 
keep one warm. A curse goes with them, as with 
Harry GilFs blankets. Nor can one get smuggled 
goods safely into kingdom-come. How lank and 
pitiful does one of these gentry look after posterity's 
customs officers have had the plucking of him ! 

PHILIP. 

It certainly is odd that it should be so hard to get 
a man's natural thought from him. No gift seems to 
be more rare than that of conveying simply and dis- 
tinctly the peculiar impression which any object 
makes upon the mind of the recipient. Give a man 
anything to describe, and he forthwith puzzles him- 
self to talk about it as some other admired person 
would do ; so that we get a thousand worthless books 
for one good one. And yet the sincere thought 
which the meanest pebble gives to a human soul is 
of great price to us. A familiar instance may be 
taken from Ossian. Macpherson, who has given us 



CHAUCER. 67 

some highly original images, spoils half his work by 
forgetting that his bard was a Gael and not a Greek, 
and by endeavoring to make Ossian speak like 
Homer. 

JOHN. 

Like Pope's Homer you mean. This constant 
reproduction of old thoughts in a new dress recalls 
to my mind a tragic reminiscence of my childhood. 
At a museum, upon which I was in the habit of 
monthly exhausting my childish income with the 
spendthrift ambition of being one day large enough 
to be charged full price for admission, there was a 
wax representation of Othello and Desdemona. Who 
these mythological personages were I knew not ; but 
Othello seemed to me the model of a fairy prince, 
and I sought alwa/s vainly, in the real world with- 
out, for anything like Desdemona. The ** Boston 
Beauty" and *' Miss McRea" in the glass case of 
the next room could never detain my feet or wile 
my heart from its fealty to her. Listen to the catas- 
trophe. Just after a famous murder had been per- 
petrated, my funds had accumulated sufficiently to 
enable me to visit the shrine of my romance. The 
proprietor of that museum may have a sweet con- 
science, but I am persuaded that he put a ninepence 
in his pocket that day which made his pillow uneasy. 
My Desdemona, to glut a depraved public appetite, 
had been metamorphosed into a Mr. Jenkins, and 
my Othello into his murderer ! That divine wax, 

^' That boon prefigured in my earliest wish," 



68 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

which I had worshipped as never Pygmalion did his 
image, or the young Roman his statue of Venus, 
had been violated. Into that room I never ventured 
again. I could have broken the nose off the 
' ' Boston Beauty " for her look of attempted un- 
concern, through which the ill-concealed triumph 
sparkled. With that feeling of revenge upon itself 
with which the heart consoles itself for any loss by 
rushing to the other extreme, I thenceforward cen- 
tred all my adoration upon " the great sea- vampire," 
an entirely original triangular conception by an in- 
genious artist in leather, which my mind, early dis- 
ciplined to the miraculous by Goldsmith's *' Ani- 
mated Nature," readily accepted as authentic. 

PHILIP. 

This tragic recollection has, I hope, put your 
mind in tune for hearing more of Grise Ida's sorrows. 
But you must read the rest of her story for yourself. 
I have many other delicates for you to taste before 
we part. Let me read you an exquisite stanza from 
*' Troilus and Creseide." It tells you how Creseide 
first avowed her love. There is nothing more tender 
in Coleridge's '* Genevieve." 






And, as the early, bashful nightingale 

Doth hush at first when she begins to sing, 

If chance she heareth any shepherd's tale, 

Or in the hedges any rusteling, 

And then more boldly doth her voice outring ; 

Cressid right so, when her first dread was spent, 

Opened her heart and gave her love full vent." 



CHAUCER. 69 

I know not where the nightingale is more sweetly 
touched upon. Shakspeare has alluded to it once or 
tv/ice, but not with enthusiasm. Coleridge, in one 
of his early poems, has given us a high strain of 
music about it. Milton's sonnet is not so fine as 
most of his, though the opening is exquisite. 

JOHN. 

Keats has written, perhaps, the best ode in the 
language upon this bird. Wherever the learned fix 
the site of Eden, it will never be in America, where 
we have neither the nightingale or the sky-lark. 
Yet we have the bobolink and the mocking-bird, in 
rich compensation. Nor are we wholly without music 
at night. I have often heard the song-sparrow and 
the robin at midnight ; and what solitude would be 
quite lonely, wanting the mournful plaint of the 
whippoorwill ? The newspapers now and then have 
lent their diurnal immortality to foolish punning 
verses upon this last bird ; but the persons who 
wrote them could never have heard its voice, or they 
would have wasted their time in some less idle 
manner. How much dignity does the love of nature 
give to minds otherwise trivial ? White's Selborne 
has become a classic. If he had chronicled the 
migrations of kings and queens and dukes and 
duchesses, he would have deserved only the trunk- 
maker's gratitude. But his court-journal of black- 
birds and gold-finches has won him an inner nook in 
our memories. 



70 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

PHILIP. 

I intend to read you presently another passage 
from '' Troilus and Creseide,'' which has been excel- 
lently modernized by Wordsworth. But first I will 
show you that Chaucer's love of nature was a passion 
with him. Listen to his praise of the daisy. It is 
in the prologue to his '' Legend of Good Women," 
and perhaps I am partial to it from its being a 
favorite with a very dear friend. If the passage have 
no other merit, it has at least that of being beloved 
by one whose love is like a crown to whatever it 
blesses. 

'' When the month of May 
Is come, and I can hear the small birds sing. 
And the fresh flowers have begun to spring, 
Good bye, my book ! devotion, too, good bye ! 
Now this peculiar frame of mind have I, 
That, among all the flowers of the mead, 
I love the most that flower white and red. 
Which men in our town the daisy name ; 
And such affection draws me unto them. 
As I have said before, when come is May, 
That in my bed there dawneth not a day 
But I am up and walking in the mead 
To see this flower against the sunshine spread. 
When it upriseth early by the morrow : 
That blissful sight doth soften all my sorrow ; 
So glad am I, when I have sight of it. 
To pay it fealty and reverence fit. 
As one that is of other flowers the flower, 
Having all good and honor for her dower, 
And ever fair alike, and fresh of hue ; 



CHAUCER. 71 

And ever I love it with a passion new, 
And ever shall until my heart shall die \ 
I swear it not, and yet I will not lie." 

How like a lover he heaps praise upon praise, and 
protestation on protestation, as if he were fearful the 
blossom might wither ere he had done it honor 
enough ! Ah, if we would but pledge ourselves to 
truth as heartily as we do to a real or imaginary mis- 
tress, and think life too short only because it abridged 
our time of service, what a new world we should 
have ! Most men pay their vows to her in youth, 
and go up into the bustle of life, with her kiss warm 
upon their lips, and her blessing lying upon their 
hearts like dew ; but the world has lips less chary, 
and cheaper benedictions, and if the broken troth- 
plight with their humble village-mistress comes over 
them sometimes with a pang, she knows how to 
blandish away remorse, and persuades them, ere old 
age, that their young enthusiasm was a folly and an 
indiscretion. 

JOHN. 

The pillow of their death-bed, however, hears the 
name of the old love again, and is made the confidant 
of some bitter tears to her memory. But you have 
given me your daisy snipped short off by the head, 
as a child does. 

PHILIP. 

'* Never man loved more hotly in his life, 
And, when the evening cometh, I run blithe, 
As soon as e'er the sun begins to west, 
To see this flower, how it will go to rest, 



72 



FIRST CONVERSATION, 

For fear of night, darkness so hateth she ; 
Her cheer is in the brightness utterly 
Of the glad sun, for there she will unclose. 
Ah, that I have not English rhyme or prose 
Enough to give this flower its praise aright ! 

My busy spirit, that still thirsts anew 

To see this flower so young and fresh of hue, 

Constrained me with such a great desire, 

That in my heart I yet can feel its fire, 

And made me rise before the peep of day, 

It being now the morning first of May, 

With glad devotion and heart full of dread. 

To see the resurrection from the dead 

Of this same flower, when it should unclose 

Against the sun that rose as red as the rose 

Which in the breast was of the beast that day 

He led Agenor's daughter fair away ; 

And down upon my knees I set me right, 

To greet this flower fresh as best I might. 

Kneeling alway till it unclosed was 

Among the tender, sweet, and new-sprung grass, 

That was with blossoms sweet embroidered all, 

• •••••• 

In which methought that I might, day by day. 
Dwell all throughout the jolly month of May, 
Withouten sleep, withouten meat or drink : 
Adown full softly I began to sink. 
And, leaning on my elbow and my side, 
Through the whole day I shaped me to abide, 
For nothing else, and I shall tell no lie, 
But on the daisy for to feed mine eye. 
That has good reason why men call it may 
The daisy, otherwise the eye of day, 



CHAUCER. 73 

The empress and the flower of flowers all : 

I pray to God that fair may it befall, 

And all that love the flowers for her sake ! " 



JOHN. 

Happy flower, to have received the homage of 
Chaucer and Wordsworth ! Happier, to have been 
ever the playmate and favorite of childhood ! There 
is a true flavor of piety in the whole of the passage 
you have read, for he that loves the creature has 
made ready a shrine for the Creator in his heart. 
The leaf of a tree has a more moving exhortation to 
the love of God written upon it, than a leaf of Taylor 
or Barrow. 

PHILIP. 

Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye 
or the ear. There is none of the senses at which she 
does not knock one day or other. The Puritans for- 
got this, and thrust beauty out of the meeting-house 
and slammed the door in her face. I love such sensu- 
ality as that which Chaucer shows in his love of nature. 
Surely, God did not give us these fine senses as so 
many posterns to the heart for the Devil to enter at. 
I believe that he has endowed us with no faculty but 
for his own glory. If the Devil has got false keys to 
them, we must first have given him a model of the 
wards to make a mould by. The senses can do 
nothing unless the soul be an accomplice, and in 
whatever the soul does, the body will have a voice. 
In all ages it has been deemed a Christian virtue to 
persecute the body. Yet persecution is a sower of 



74 



FIRST CONVERSATION', 



dragon's teeth, from which spring armed men to do 
battle against her. We have driven the world and 
the flesh, against their wills, into a league with 
the Devil. If we provided ourselves with half as 
many arguments for loving God as we have against 
forgetting him, we should be both wiser and better. 
To be a sensualist in a certain kind and to a certain 
degree is the mark of a pure and youthful nature. 
To be able to keep a just balance between sense 
and spirit, and to have the soul welcome frankly all 
the delicious impulses which flow to it from without, 
is a good and holy thing. But it must welcome them 
as the endearments of a wife, not of a harlot. A 
Dryad and a Satyr may drink out of the same spring. 
A poet must be as sensitive as the yielding air, and 
as pure. To a soul which is truly king of itself, and 
not a prisoner in its desolate palace, the senses are 
but keepers of its treasury, and all beautiful things 
pay their tribute throtcgh these, and not to them. If 
they are allowed to squander the treasure upon their 
own lusts, the subjects turn niggard and withhold the 
supplies. 

JOHN. 

All things that make us happy incline us also to 
be grateful, and I would rather enlarge than lessen 
the number of these. Morose and callous recluses 
have persuaded men that religion is a prude, and 
have forced her to lengthen her face and contract 
her brows to suit the character. They have laid out 
a gloomy turnpike to heaven, upon which they and 
their heirs and assigns are privileged to levy tolls, 



CHA UCER. 



75 



and have set up guide-boards to make us believe 
that all other roads lead in quite an opposite direc- 
tion. The pleasanter they are, the more dangerous. 
For my part, I am satisfied that I am upon the right 
path so long as I can see anything to make me hap- 
pier, anything to make me love man, and therefore 
God, the more. I would stamp God's name, and 
not Satan's, upon every innocent pleasure, upon 
every legitimate gratification of sense, and God would 
be the better served for it. In what has Satan de- 
served so well of us that we should set aside such 
first-fruits for him? Christianity differs not more 
widely from Plato than from the Puritans. 

PHILIP. 

The church needs reforming now as much as in 
Luther's time, and sells her indulgences as readily. 
There are altars to which the slaveholder is admitted, 
while the Unitarian would be put forth as unclean. 
If it be God's altar, both have a right there, — the 
sinner most of all, — but let hm not go unrebuked. 
We hire our religion by the quarter, and if it tells 
any disagreeable truths, we dismiss it, for we did 
not pay it for such service as this. Christ scourged 
the sellers of doves out of the temple ; we invite the 
sellers of men and women in. We have few such 
preachers now as Nathan was. They preach against 
sin in the abstract, shooting their arrows into the 
woundless air. Let sin wrap itself in superfine 
broadcloth, and put its name on charitable subscrip- 
tion-papers, and it is safe. We bandy compliments 



-jd FIRST CONVERSdTION. 

with it, instead of saying sternly, '* Get thee behind 
me ! " The Devil might listen to some preaching I 
have heard, without getting his appetite spoiled. 
There is a great deal of time and money expended 
to make men believe that this one or that one will 
be damned, and to scare or wheedle them into good 
Calvinists or Episcopalians ; but very little pains is 
taken to make them good Christians. 

JOHN. 

You use plain words. 

PHILIP. 

Plain words are best. Truth wants no veil ; the 
chastity and beauty of her countenance are defence 
enough against all lewd eyes. Falsehood, only, 
needs to hide her face ; for, that unseen, she has 
learned so well to mimic the gait and feign the 
voice of Truth as to counterfeit her with ease and 
safety. Our tongue has become so courtly and 
polite as well-nigh to have forgotten that it has 
also words befitting indignation and reproof. Some 
thoughts demand the utmost swell and voluptuous- 
ness of language ; they should float like Aphrodite 
upborne on a summer ocean. For others, the words 
should be jagged and immitigable and abrupt, as 
the rocks upon the shore. Let the feeling of the 
moment choose. If melody be needed, the chance 
shell of the tortoise shall become a lyre which 
Apollo might sigh for. 



CHAUCER. J J 

JOHN. 

It has never been a safe thing to breathe a whisper 
against the church, least of all in this country, where 
it has no prop from the state, but is founded only on 
the love, or, if you will have it so, the prejudices of 
the people. Religion has come to be esteemed 
synonymous with the church ; there are few minds 
clear enough to separate it from the building erected 
for its convenience and its shelter. It is this which 
has made our Christianity external, a task-ceremony 
to be gone through with, and not a principle of life 
itself. The church has been looked on too much in 
the light of a machine, which only needs a little oil 
now and then on its joints and axles to make it run 
glibly and perform all its functions without grating or 
creaking. Nothing that we can say will be of much 
service. The reformers must come from her own 
bosom ; and there are many devout souls among her 
priests now who would lay down their lives to purify 
her. The names of infidel and heretic are the Sa7i 
benitos in which we dress offenders in the nineteenth 
century, and a bigoted public opinion furnishes the 
fagots and applies the match ! The very cross itself, 
to which the sacred right of private judgment fled 
for sanctuary, has been turned into a whipping-post. 
Doubtless there are no nations on the earth so 
wicked as those which profess Christianity ; and the 
blame may be laid in great measure at the door of 
the church, which has always sought temporal power, 
and has chosen rather to lean upon the arm of flesh 



78 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

than upon that of God. The church has corrupted 
Christianity. She has decked her person and em- 
broidered her garments with the spoils of pagan 
altars, and has built her temples of blocks which 
paganism had squared ready to her hand. We are 
still Huns and Vandals, and Saxons and Celts, at 
heart. We have carved a cross upon our altars, but 
the smoke of our sacrifice goes up to Thor and Odin 
still. Lately I read in the newspapers a toast given 
at a military festival, by one of those who claim to 
be the earthly representatives of the Prince of Peace. 
England and France send out the cannon and the 
bayonet, upon missionary enterprises, to India and 
Africa, and our modern Eliots and Brainerds among 
the red men are of the same persuasive metal. 

PHILIP. 

Well, well, let us hope for change. There are 
signs of it ; there has been a growling of thunder 
round the horizon for many days. We are like the 
people in countries subject to earthquakes, who 
crowd into the churches for safety, but find that 
their sacred walls are as fragile as other works of 
human hands. Nay, the very massiveness of their 
architecture makes their destruction more sudden 
and their fall more dangerous. You and I have 
become convinced of this. Both of us, having cer- 
tain reforms at heart, and believing them to be of 
vital interest to mankind, turned first to the church 
as the nearest helper under God. We have been 
disappointed. Let us not waste our time in throw- 



CHA UCER. 



79 



ing stones at its insensible doors. As you have 
said, the reformers must come from within. The 
prejudice of position is so strong that all her servants 
will unite against an exoteric assailant, melting up, if 
need be, the holy vessels for bullets, and using the 
leaves of the holy book itself for wadding. But I 
will never enter a church from which a prayer goes 
up for the prosperous only, or for the unfortunate 
among the oppressors and not for the oppressed and 
fallen ; as if God had ordained our pride of caste 
and our distinctions of color, and as if Christ had 
forgotten those that are in bonds. We are bid to 
imitate God ; let us in this also follow his example, 
whose only revenge upon error is the giving success 
to truth, and but strive more cheerfully for the triumph 
of what we believe to be right. Let us, above all 
things, imitate him in ascribing what we see of 
wrong-doing to blindness and error rather than to 
wilful sin. The Devil loves nothing better than the 
intolerance of reformers, and dreads nothing so much 
as their charity and patience. The scourge is better 
upon our backs than in our hands. 

JOHN. 

When the air grows thick and heavy, and the 
clouds gather in the moral atmosphere, the tall 
steeples of the church are apt to attract the lightning 
first. Its pride and love of high places are the most 
fatal of conductors. That small upper room, in 
which the disciples were first gathered, would always 
be safe enough. 



8o FIRST CONVERSATION. 

PHILIP. 

We have wandered too far among these thorns 
and briers ; let us come back to smoother ground. 
There are one or two passages in the * ' Legend of 
Good Women" which I will read to you. My 
translations are very bald, but I adhere as closely as 
I can to the very words of my author. The number 
of accented syllables and terminations in Chaucer's 
time renders any translation from his poems neces- 
sarily less compact and precise than the original. I 
must often, too, lose much of the harmony of the 
verse ; but I shall not try to conciliate your ear at 
the expense of faithfulness. Here is a fragment from 
his story of Thisbe. Pyramus has found her bloody 
wimple. 

'* He smote him to the heart ; 
The blood out of the wound as broad did start 
As water when the conduit broken is. 
Now Thisbe, who knew nothing yet of this. 
But sitting in her dread, bethought her thus : 
^ If it so fall out that my Pyramus 
Have hastened hither and may me not find, 
He may esteem me false or eke unkind.' 
And out she comes, and after him espies 
Both with her anxious heart and with her eyes, 
And thought, ' Now will I tell him my distress, 
For fear of death and of the lioness.' 
And at the last, her lover hath she found, 
Abeating with his heels upon the ground, 
All bloody; and therewith she back doth start, 
And like the waves to heave began her heart, 
And, in a moment, pale as box she grew ; 



CHA UCER, 8 1 

Then looking steadily, right well she knew 
That it was Pyramus, her own heart's dear. 

^* Who could write ever what a deadly cheer 
Hath Thisbe now, and how her hair she rent, 
And how herself began she to torment, 
And how she lies and swoons upon the ground, 
And how with tears she filled full his wound, 
How clippeth she the blood-red corse, alas ! 
How doth the woful Thisbe in this case ! 
How kisseth she his frosty mouth so cold ! 
* Who hath done this? O, who hath been so bold, 
To slay my love ? O, speak, my Pyramus ! 
I am thy Thisbe that thee calleth thus ! ' 
And therewithal she lifted up his head. 
This woful man, who was not wholly dead. 
Hearing that one the name of Thisbe cries. 
On her cast up his heavy, deadly eyes. 
Then down again, and yielded up the ghost. 
Thisbe rose up withouten noise or boast. 
And saw her wimple and his empty sheath. 
And eke his sword that him hath done to death ; 
Then spake she thus; ' My woful hand,' quoth she, 
' Is strong enough in such a work for me ; 
For love will give me strength and hardiness 
To make my wound full large enough, I guess. 
I will thee follow dead, and I will be 
Partaker of the death I caused,' quoth she, 
' And although nothing but the death could ever 
Have force enough thyself and me to sever. 
Thou shalt no more be parted now from me. 
Than from thy death; for I will follow thee.' 



5 5? 



In choosing my extracts, I have endeavored to 
avoid those which have been already modernized by 



82 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

others. A volume was published in London three- 
or four years ago, by R. H. Home, containing new 
versions of some of the best of Chaucer^s poems. 
Many of these are excellent, those by Wordsworth 
especially. The original plan seems to have been 
to publish other volumes, till a complete translation 
should be accomplished. As no continuation has 
appeared, we must presume that the English have 
not yet awakened to the merits of their first great 
poet. Mr. Charles Cowden Clarke deserves well of 
the lovers of our lano^uao^e for his excellent little 
volumes entitled "The Riches of Chaucer," which 
contain all the better parts of his poems. 

JOHN. 

He has another claim upon our esteem, also, as 
having been the earliest friend and admirer of Keats. 

PHILIP. 

In the next legend, of Dido, there are a few lines 
which I must read you for their delightful freshness 
and spirit. 

^'Upon a lowly palfrey, paper-white, 

With saddle red, embroidered with delight, 

Of gold the bars, upward embossed high, 

Sat Dido, rough with gold and jewelry ; 

And she is fair as is the bright to-morrow. 

That healeth sick folk of the night's long sorrow. 

Upon a courser, startling as the fire. 

Though men might turn him with a little wire, 

yEneas sat, like Phoebus." 



CHAUCER. 83 

JOHN. 

How delicious is that comprehensive description 
of Didoes beauty ! It fills the heart at once with a 
thousand images and forewarnings of delight, as the 
sight of beauty itself does. 

PHILIP. 

Yes, beauty seldom affects us so much in the 
present as by a prophecy of some yet unfulfilled 
satisfaction which she has in store for us. She 
seems to beckon us ever into yet more Elysian 
realms of quiet and serenity, and is but the guide 
to something higher and beyond. 

JOHN. 

* * Startling as the fire " gives us such a picture as 
inspires and dilates the imagination. Shakspeare's 
famous description of a horse, in his ''Venus and 
Adonis," with all its minuteness, does not satisfy me 
as well as this. It seems rather like the fine frenzy 
of an inspired jockey. In such slight and ordinary 
touches the power of the poet is best shown. A 
great subject may lift up even a common and earthy 
mind, and give it an inspiring breadth of view. But 
this is only from isolated peaks and summits, in 
climbing to which the enthusiasm wearies and flags. 
But the strength of a great poet is in his own magnif- 
icent eye, which borrows not from without, but lends 
whatever it looks on a dignity and an untiring grace 
from within. Every word of his is like a new-created 
star or flower, or a new-found one, and sets all our 



84 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

nature astir, as the spring wakes and enlivens the 
sluggish earth. The heart grows green again and 
blossoms ; the old tendrils of childish sympathy be- 
come as supple and delicate as ever, and, reaching 
out, grasp and cling to whatever they first chance to 
touch. 

PHILIP. 

You will never describe it. We can never say 
why we love, but only that we love. The heart is 
ready enough at feigning excuses for all that it 
does or imagines of wrong ; but ask it to give a rea- 
son for any of its beautiful and divine motions, and 
it can only look upward and be dumb. When we 
are in the right, we can never reason, but only as- 
sert. A weak cause generally has the best in an 
argument. As you have been so much struck with 
some isolated expressions used by Chaucer, I will 
glean a few others for you. It is a pity to knock 
the jewels out of their setting, but they will shine 
notwithstanding. Here is a passage from ** The 
Knight's Tale," describing the temple of Mars. 

" A forest first was painted on the wall, 

In which there dwells nor man, nor beast at all, 
With trees all knotty, knarry, barren, old, 
With sharp, dead limbs and hideous to behold. 
Through which there ran a rumble and a sough, 
As if the wind would shatter every bough." 

There is no such desolation as this in all Lord 
Byron's nightmare ** darkness." 



CHAUCER. 85 

** There saw I first the dark imagining 
Of Felony, and all the compassing ; 
The cruel ire, as any coal aglow; 
The pickpurse, and the palefaced dread also ; 
The smiler with the knife under the' cloak ; 
The stables burning in the ink-black smoke ; 
The treason of the murdering in the bed ; 
The open war with wounds all overbled ; 
Contest with bloody knife and sharp menace ; 
And full of ill sounds was that sorry place. 
The slayer of himself, too, saw I there, 
His thick heart's blood hath bathed all his hair, 
The nail fast-driven through the hair beside. 
The cold death with the mouth all gaping wide : 
And in the temple's midst there sat Mischance, 
With pain at heart and sorry countenance ; 
There saw I Madness, laughing in his rage ; 
Armed complaint, outcries, and fierce outrage ; 
The carrion in the bush with throat cut through ; 
A thousand slain whom sickness never slew ; 
The tyrant with the prey his force had reft ; 
The town destroyed, that there was nothing left ; 
There burned the ships that danced upon the main ; 
There lay the hunter by the wild bears slain ; 
The sow tearing the child right in the cradle ; 
The cook scalded, in spite of his long ladle ; 
Naught was forgot of all the woes of war, 
The charioteer, o'erridden by his car, 
Under the wheel full low was cast adown. 
There also were, of Mars' division. 
The armorer, the bowyer, and the smith, 
Who forgeth the sharp swords upon his stith ; 
And, painted in a tower that rose on high, 
Conquest I saw, that sat in sovereignty. 



86 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

While that keen blade did waver o'er his head, 
Ahanging by a slender strand of thread." 

Mars is described standing upon a chariot, 

'' A wolf there stood before him at his feet, 
With fire-red eyes, and of a man did eat." 

You will hardly find in Spenser a catalogue like 
this, so grim and so straightforward. Here is no 
flourish ; but Chaucer only tells us, or tries to tell us, 
what he saw. It is abrupt and disjointed, as if re- 
called piecemeal by an effort of memory. 

JOHN. 

I do not overlike personifications, as they are 
called, yet I shall not soon forget this one of Con- 
quest, sitting under the sword of Damocles. But 
what have the sow, and the cook with his long ladle, 
to do in the picture ? 

PHILIP. 

Tyrwhitt is as much puzzled as you, but hazards 
a conjecture that Chaucer was having a sly laugh at 
the tedious particularity of the Romancers. But I 
hardly think so, since to me this couplet adds a cer- 
tain tang and pungency to the taste of the whole pas- 
sage. It gives it reality, and makes it seem less like 
a work of the imagination. We are loath to fancy so 
dainty a faculty as the imagination sweeping the 
greasy floor of the kitchen with her majestic robes ; 
and so we are fain to believe that the poet is merely 
giving us a literal account of what he saw. 



CHAUCER. 87 

JOHN. 

You have made me a little more liberal in these 
matters of taste than I once was. The sow eating 
the child, which the nurse has left deserted in the 
cradle, gives me as intense an idea of the horror of 
war and of the selfishness which danger inculcates, 
as it is possible to conceive. Horror is poetical. It 
is the gin and opium of the Muse ; the excitement 
and thrill are not unpleasing for once or twice. But 
a ludicrous idea is inadmissible ; it must smooth the 
grin and smirk off its face before it can get entrance 
into the silent and serene temple of song. 

PHILIP. 

Ay, but there is no court-dress there. Words and 
phrases are vulgar or trivial according to the ear on 
which they fall. I confess that I have an ear that 
will gladly entertain anything that comes plainly and 
unmasked, and does not impose itself as something 
superior to what it truly is. There are Nimrods 
enough of words and syllables, without my joining in 
the hunt. The Muse can breathe as august melodies 
through an oaten straw as she can win from Apollo's 
lute. Chaucer is never very choice in his language 
for the mere sake of being so. He is so rich that 
he can afford a plain simpleness which would be the 
badge of beggary in a poorer man. He is plain and 
blunt, and speaks to the point. He thrusts his foot 
remorselessly through the gossamers of sentimental 
fancy, though he might have spared them for their 
making the dew of heaven more visible. When 
Arcite is dead, 



88 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

" ' Why wouldest thou be dead,' the women cry, 
* That haddest gold enough, and Emily ? ' " 

''T\i2ii haddest gold enough — and Emily." See 
how the actual life, the life of debtor and creditor, 
of the butcher and baker, intrudes itself upon the life 
of romance, nay, takes precedence of it in the mind 
of this unartificial man. The means first, be they 
never so humble and prosaic ; and then the poetic 
end, which casts backward a lustre and a glory upon 
them. This simplicity of his reminds me of Homer, 
who gives a bill of fare of all the feasts, as one whose 
calling had made him sensible of the merits of such 
delicates by their infrequency. 

In ' ' The Pardoner^s Tale " there is a most graphic 
simile, which modern taste would probably censure 
as deficient in dignity. The Pardoner is describing 
his style of preaching : 

**Then do I preach as ye have heard before, 
And tell a hundred idle stories more ; 
Then do I pain me to stretch forth my neck, 
And east and west upon the people I beck, 
As doth a dove sitting upon a barn J''' 

Here is another specimen of his simplicity, from 
the third book of his * * Troilus and Creseide " : 

'^ Consider now if they be not to blame, 

This kind of folk, — what shall I call them, what? — 
That boast of women's favors, and by name. 
Who yet have granted them nor this nor that, 
Nor think more of them than of my old hat.'' "* 

And, a little further on, 



CHAUCER. 89 

'^ But, if a fool were in a jealous rage, 
I would not Sethis sorrow at a mite.'*'' 

Speaking of oracles, Pandarus says, 

'* As for Apollo, and his servants' laws, 
Or oracles, they are not worth three straws. 
For the gods speak in amphibologies. 
And for one truth they tell us twenty lies." 

Describing Cressid, too, his frankness peeps out : 

*' Somewhat too low might Cressid 's stature be, 
But for her shape and face, and eke her cheer. 
Creature there never was more fair than she ; 
And oftentimes her manner was, to appear 
With all her hair hanging in tresses clear 
Down by her collar o'er her neck behind. 
Which with a thread of gold she would upbind. 
And, saving that her brows -were joined too 7iear^ 
There was no lack in aught I can espy." 

JOHN. 

Chaucer is as close and determined an imitator of 
nature as Poussin, who used to bring home stones 
and moss in his handkerchief, in order to paint them 
exactly. Such scrupulous honesty betokens the true 
artist, who is a mathematician in his details, and only 
lays claim to the title of creator by his fresh and 
beautiful combinations. 

PHILIP. 

Now let me glean a few striking expressions which 
you cannot but admire. When Cressid was carried 
to the Grecian camp, she had promised Troilus to 
steal back to him upon a certain evening, and for 



90 



FIRST CONVERSATION. 



some time clings to her promise. But Chaucer says 
that, ere two full months, the thought of Troilus and 
Troy 

'* Throughout her heart shall knotless slide, ^^ 

We never feel the whole bitterness of a sorrow at 
the first blow. It is after we have recovered from 
the sudden shock of it, and the imagination has 
leisure to concern itself with details, that we know 
its w^iole depth and breadth. Then we find that the 
little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, has spread 
itself over our whole heaven. Chaucer has hinted at 
this, in what he says of Troilus. 

*' And, as in winter, when the leaves are reft, 
Each after other, till the trees are bare. 
So that there are but bark and branches left, 
So Troilus, bereft of each welfare, 
Lies bounden in the ugly bark of care." 

When Troilus is first brought to an interview with 
Cressid, Pandarus 

*' Drew him to the fire, 
And by that light beheld his countenance. 
As 't were to look upon an old romance." 

JOHN. 

That last is exquisite. The eager flush of love, 
and the warm, flickering light of the fire upon 
Troilus's face, scarcely more wavering and uncertain 
than the expression there, — the whole picture, in 
short, seems like an old romance with its illuminated 
borders and capitals, and its stories of love and 



CHAUCER. 



91 



sorrow. You will not easily find me another com- 
parison like this. 

PHILIP. 

At least here is one that touches me more. It is 
in *'The Complaint of Annelida,'' who has been de- 
serted by *' the false Arcite." She says, 

*' Arcite hath borne away the key 

Of all my worlds and my good hap to come,^^ 

There is something very pathetic in this. 

JOHN. 

Yes. As if she stood in sight of the fair maiden 
world she had left for the sake of Arcite, and but 
just on the outside of happiness, yet was irrevocably 
locked out. 

PHILIP. 

In ** The Book of the Duchess '' there is one of 
the most beautiful portraits of a woman that were 
ever drawn. Full of life it is, and of graceful health, 
with no romantic hectic or sentimental languish. It 
is such a figure as you would never look for in a ball- 
room, but might expect to meet in the dewy woods, 
just after sunrise, when you were hunting for late 
violets. The lover, who tells Chaucer of her, says, 

'^ I was caught 
So suddenly, that I ne'er took 
Counsel of aught but of her look, 
And of my heart : for her kind eyes ;| 

So gladly on my heart did rise, ' 

That instantly my inmost thought 
Said it were better serve her for naught, 
Than with another to be well." 



92 



FIRST CONVERSATION, 



It is too long for me to read you the whole of it, 
but I will gladden your heart with a few lines here 
and there. I shall hardly more than modernize 
the words. I should spoil it were I to attempt to 
translate it into smooth verses. See how joyfully it 
opens : 

'' I saw her dance so comely, 
Carol and sing so sweetly, 
Laugh and play so womanly, 
And look so debonairly. 
So goodly speak, and so friendly. 
That, certes, I trow that nevermore 
Was seen so blissful a treasore ; 
For every hair upon her head, 
Sooth to say, it was not red. 
And neither yellow nor brown it was, 
Methought most like to gold it was; 
And such eyes my lady had. 
Debonair, good, steady, and glad. 
Simple, of good size, not too wide ; 
And then her look was not aside. 
Nor wandering, but so right and true, 
That, certes, it took up and drew 
All that upon her 'gan behold. 
• • • • • 

Even when most full of joy was she, 
She never could look foolishly. 
Nor wildly, even when she played ; 
But ever, methought, her kind eyes said, 
''Par fay ^ my wrath is all forgiven.' 

• • • • o 

I have not wit that can suffice 
Her beauty to speak properly, 



CHAUCER, 93 

But thus much I dare say, that she 

Was white, fresh, ruddy, and lively-hued. 

And every day her beauty newed. 



And thereto she could so well play 

Whate'er she list, that I dare say, 

That she was like a torch-flame bright, 

Whence every man can take of light 

Enough, and it hath never the less 

Of lustre and of comeliness. 

• • • • • 

She had a wit so general. 

So whole inclined to all good, 

That it was ever set by the rood, 

To swell the store of happiness; 

Moreover, I ne'er saw one less 

Harmful than she to say or do ; 

I say not that she did not know 

What evil was, or else had she 

Known naught of good, as seems to me. 

• • • • • 

*•• Methought all fellowship was naked, 
Without her, having seen her once, 
As is a crown without the stones." 

JOHN. 

It is like sunshine. It awakens all the dearest and 
sweetest recollections of the heart. The best poetry 
always comes to us leading by the hand the holy 
associations and tear-strengthened aspirings of youth, 
as Volumnia brought to Coriolanus his little children, 
to plead reproachfully with us, to be tender, and meek, 
and patient. ** Chevy Chase" was like the blast of 



94 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

a trumpet to Sir Philip Sidney ; the passages I love 
in the poets give me back an hour of childhood, and 
are like a mother^s voice to me. They are as solemn 
as the rustle of the Bible-leaves in the old family- 
prayers. The noisy ocean of life hushes, and slides 
up his beach with a soothing and slumberous ripple. 
The earth becomes secluded and private to me as in 
childhood, when it seemed but a little meadow-green, 
guarded all round with trees, for me to pick flowers 
in ; a playroom, whose sole proprietor and manager I 
was. When Chaucer wrote this poem he must have 
been musing of his early love. How^ could critic 
ever grow so leathern-hearted as to speak sneeringly 
of love-verses ? 

PHILIP. 

I cannot guess. They are often blamed for their 
egoism, when, in fact, they are the least egoistical of 
all writing. If self is anywhere forgotten, it is in 
these. They are all hymns to the supreme beauty. 
In all of them the lover would only remind the 
beloved that their trysting-place is at the foot of that 
divine altar. The one I have just read a fragment 
of reminds me of a passage in George Withers's 
*' Philarette " which, both in metre and expression, 
is brimful of the most joyous simplicity and extrava- 
gant fancy. All through it, the poet's heart seems to 
dance for glee, like a child. A truly Arcadian sun- 
shine broods over it. I could think it written before 
such a thing as sorrow was invented. It is one of 
those sweet nooks into which the mind can with- 



CHAUCER. 95 

draw from the turmoil and hurry of life, and play 
with the grass and flowers in ungirt ease. 

Let me read you now, from *' The Legend of 
Cleopatra," something of a very different kind. It is 
a bustling description of a sea-fight. 

'' And in the middle sea they chanced to meet ; 

Up goes the trump ; with shots and shouts they greet, 

And hasten them to set on with the sun ; 

With grisly sound outgoeth the great gun, 

And heartily they hurtle in all at once ; 

And from the top down tumble the great stones ; 

In go the grappling-irons full of crooks ; 

Among the thick ropes run the sheering-hooks ; 

In with the pole-axe presseth he and he ; 

Behind the mast beginneth he to flee, 

And out again, and overboard him drives ; 

Through this one's side the ragged spear-point rives ; 

This rends the sail with sharp hooks like a scythe. 

This brings the cup and biddeth them be blithe. 

This on the hatches poureth slippery pease. 

With pots of lime together struggle these. 

And thus the whole long day in fight they spend." 

In "The Knight's Tale" there is another very 
much like this, except that the scene is on land. 

^'The heralds leave their pricking up and down, 
And rings the trumpet loud and clarion'; 
There is no more to say, but, east and west, 
Down go the lances to their stubborn rest. 
Plunges the sharp spur in the horse's side, 
Now see we who can joust and who can ride ; 
There shiver shafts upon the bucklers thick. 
And through the heart is felt the deadly prick : 



96 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

Up spring the lances twenty feet in height, 
Out go the sword-blades as the silver bright ; ' 
The helmets tough they hew and hack and shred, 
Out bursts the heart's blood in stern torrents red ; 
With mighty maces through the bones they crush. 
And 'mid the thickest of the throng 'gin rush ; 
There stumble the strong steeds, and down goes all. 
And under foot they roll as doth a ball ; 
One with a truncheon foileth at his foe. 
And one him hurtleth from his horse full low ; 
One through the body is hurt, and they him take, 
Maugre his head, and bear him to the stake 
As was agreed, and there he must abide." 

JOHN. 

They remind me of some of Leigh Hunt's descrip- 
tions, though he sometimes dwindles a little too 
much into the inventory style, and counts the nails 
in the horses' shoes, and the wrinkles in the knights' 
tunics. Yet no man has ever understood the deli- 
cacies and luxuries of language better than he, and 
his thoughts often have all the rounded grace and 
shifting lustre of a dove's neck. 

PHILIP. 

He is often too refined to be easily understood by 
the mob of readers. He is tracing out the nerves 
and veinlets, when it had been better for his popu- 
larity if he had developed only the muscles and 
arteries. There is a great difference between being 
too refined and too minute ; and he is as often the 
one as the other. He gathers together, kernel by 
kernel, a bushel of corn, and then wonders why we 



CHAUCER, 97 

do not admire his picture of a cornfield. Keats and 
Tennyson are both masters of description, but Keats 
had the finer ear for all the nice analogies and sug- 
gestions of sound, while his eye had an equally in- 
stinctive rectitude of perception in color. Tennyson's 
epithets suggest a silent picture ; Keats' the very 
thing itself, with its sound or stillness. 

JOHN. 

I remember a stanza of Tennyson's which unites 
these excellences. 

" A still, salt pool, locked in with bars of sand, 
Left on the shore ; which hears all night 
The plunging seas draw backward from the land 
Their moon-led waters white." 

PHILIP. 

That is one of the most perfect images in any 
language, and as a picture of a soul made lonely and 
selfish by indulgence in over-refined philosophizing, 
it is yet more exquisite. But if Tennyson's mind 
be more sensitive, Keats' is grander and of a larger 
grasp. It may be a generation or two before there 
comes another so delicate thinker and speaker as 
Tennyson ; but it will be centuries before another 
nature so spontaneously noble and majestic as that of 
Keats and so tender and merciful too, is embodied. 
What a scene of despair is that of his, where Saturn 
finds the vanquished Titans ! 

** Scarce images of life, one here, one there, 
Lay vast and edgeways, like a dismal cirque 



98 FIRST CONVERSATION. 

Of Druid-stones upon a forlorn moor, 
When the chill rain begins at shut of eve, 
In dull November — " 

And what can be more perfect than this ? 

** So far her voice flowed on, like timorous brook. 
That, lingering along a pebbled coast, 
Doth fear to meet the sea ; but sea it met. 
And shuddered ; for the overwhelming voice 
Of huge Enceladus swallowed it in wrath : 
The ponderous syllables, like sullen waves 
In the half-glutted hollows of reef-rocks. 
Came booming thus." 

JOHN. 

The world is not yet aware of the w^onderful merit 
of Keats. Men have squabbled about Chatterton, 
and written lives of Kirke White, while they have 
treated with contempt the rival and, I will dare to 
say, the sometimes superior, of Milton. The critics 
gravely and with reverence hold up their bit of 
smoked glass between you and the lantern at a kite's 
tail, and bid you behold the sun, undazzled ; but 
their ceremonious fooleries will one day be as ridicu- 
lous as those of the Tahitian priests. Keats can 
afitbrd to wait, and he will yet be sacred to the hearts 
of all those who love the triumphs and ovations of 
our noble mother-tongue. 

PHILIP. 

I must please myself with one more quotation 
from his " Hyperion." After the murmur among the 
Titans at Saturn's entrance has ceased. 



th ; 



CHA UCER, 



99 



'* Saturn's voice therefrom 
Grew up like organ, that begins anew 
Its strain, when other harmonies stopped shoj't^ 
Leave the dhmed air vibrating silver ly. ' ' 

Could sound and sense harmonize more fitly? In 
reading it, the voice flows on at first smoothly and 
equably. At the end of the third verse it pauses ab- 
ruptly in spite of itself, and in the last vibrates and 
wavers in accordance with the meaning. You see 
the art with which the word ' ' vibrating " is placed 
so as to prevent you from reading the verse monot- 
onously. Among the ancient poets, I can detect 
none of the nice feeling of language which distin- 
guishes many of our own. I recognize it in that 
oft-quoted passage in ^schylus, where Prometheus 

invokes 

*' TzovTiLdv re KVjudrcov 

av7jpid(iov /eAacr/za," 

in which the long roll of the first syllables, the 
liquid sound of avripiBjiov, and the plashing ripple 
of yeAaofia^ seem to convey some audible suggestion 
of the sea. Now and then I fancy I can trace a 
few similar glimpses in Ovid, who is to me the truest 
poet among the Latins, but they would probably 
elude any but a partial ear. Beside this passage of 
i^schylus, I would set one from Spenser. 

** With that the rolling sea, resounding soft. 
In his big base, then fitly answered, 
And on the rocks the waves breaking aloft, 
A solemne meane unto them measured, 
The whiles sweet Zephyrus loud whisteled 
His treble." 

L. tf C. 



loo FIRST CONVERSATION. 

I cannot doubt but the hissing sound given to the 
fifth verse by the number of j'-s was intentional. 

JOHN. 

There is a Hne in Longfellow's ballad of "• The 
Wreck of the Hesperus," which has always pleased 
both my imagination and my ear. 

PHILIP. 

I think I know which one you mean. I will repeat 
it at a venture. It is the last of these two : 

^' And a whooping billow swept her crew, 
Like icicles from her deck." 

Am I right? 

JOHN. 

Yes. I do not like the epithet "-whooping^'' in 
the first verse, but I consider the whole of the last 
admirable. A single, happy epithet is always worth 
a folio of description ; and in this the word ' * ici- 
cles " tells me the whole story. 

PHILIP. 

I like it as much as you do. 

JOHN. 

In Leigh Hunt's *' Hero and Leander " there is a 
descriptive verse which I esteem one of the rarest of 
its kind. Hero is expecting Leander on the last 
fatal niofht. 



'is' 



*' Hero looked forth, and trerrrbling augured ill, 
The darkness held its breath so very stilL^'' 



CHAUCER. loi 

PHILIP. 

In this there is the great merit that the ideas sug- 
gested give vigor and support to the mere external 
significance. It is very natural that Hero should 
personify the darkness, and attribute an evil intent to 
it ; and one who meditates or strikes a revengeful 
blow holds in his breath. There is another version 
of Musaeus's story, by Marlow and Chapman, which 
is crowded full of beauties. Here are a few lines in 
point. 

" Buskins of shells all silvered used she, 
And branched with blushing coral to the knee ; 
Where sparrows perched, of hollow pearl and gold, 
Such as the world would wonder to behold ; 
These with sweet water oft her handmaid fills, 
Which, as she went^ would cherup through their bills,'''' 

This is a gift of Marlow's luxurious fancy. He 
throws down such by the handful. The last verse, 
you see, illustrates the topic we have sauntered to- 
I remember that John S. Dwight, who has a very 
refined insight in such matters, commends Bryant 
for his excellence in descriptive epithets, and quotes, 
in support of his opinion, this verse : 

*^ With valleys j^tf^/^<2^ between." 

This is one of those epithets whose beauty lies in its 
simplicity and plainness. Ordinary poets, having a 
natural fellow-feeling with ordinary objects, strive to 
elevate them by a lofty scaffolding of words, not being 
able to conceive that the most natural image (so it 



I02 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

be drawn from nothing in itself base) is always the 
most noble. They buckle the cothurnus upon the 
feet of a dwarf, and make him ridiculous by the en- 
forced majesty of his gait. The true poet picks up a 
common reed and entices ravishing melody from it. 
Humbleness is always grace, always dignity. The 
propriety and force of the epithet quoted above is 
confirmed by its having occurred to another mind, 
also a highly poetical one. Wesley, in his Journal, 
says : 

'' The place in which I preached was an oval spot of 
ground, surrounded with spreading trees, scooped out^ as it 
were, in the side of a hill, which rose round like a thea- 
tre." — Southey^ s life of Wesley (American Edition), 
II., 49. 

Before we lay down Chaucer, let me read a few 
more passages. In '*The Man of Law's Tale" 
there is a terribly graphic stanza : 

" Have ye not sometimes seen a pallid face, 
Among a press, of him that hath been led 
Toward his death where he can hope no grace. 
And such a color in his face hath had. 
That men might know him that was so bested. 
Among the crowd of faces in that rout ? 
So Constance stands and looketh her about." 

Chaucer had a great deal of what is called knowl- 
edge of the world, but it never rendered him sour or 
contemptuous. Whenever he turns his eye that way, 
his glance softens with pity or with a good-humored 



CHA UCER, 



103 



smile. In " The Story of Cambuscan bold," he de- 
scribes the crowd who gathered about the wonderful 
brazen horse, each one of whom, in proportion to his 
ignorance, is anxious to express an opinion about it. 
He ends by saying : 

'' As unlearned people fancy commonly, 
Of whatsoever thing may chance to be 
More subtly made than they can comprehend, 
They gladly set it down for soj?ie bad end, ^"^ 

I am merely reading at random such passages as 
strike me. In *' The Pardoner's Tale " Chaucer de- 
scribes Death as a weary old man, in a compassionate 
kind of way that makes us pity him. Three riotous 
fellows have sworn to be revenged upon Death, if 
they can find him. Presently they meet an old man 
(Death himself) who says to them : 

*' For I cannot find 
A man, though I should walk to farthest Ind, 
Either in any city or village, 
That would exchange his youth for my old age ; 
And therefore must I keep mine old age still, 
As long a time as it is God's good will ; 
Even Death, alas ! my poor life will not have. 
Thus do I wander like a restless slave, 
And on the earth, which is my mother's gate, 
Thus knock I with my staff, early and late, 
And say to her, ' Leave, mother, let me in ; 
Lo, how I vanish, flesh, and blood, and skin ! 
Alas ! when shall my old bones be at rest? ' " 



I04 



FIRST CONVERSATION. 



JOHN. 

Death has been hardly ever so tenderly spoken 
of. It is singular what ugly portraits of him are 
ordinarily given us. There seems to be but little 
living faith in the immortality of the soul ; so soon 
does any idea become formal and external, when 
diluted by the customariness of a creed. Men do 
not believe in the next world as they do in London 
or Boston ; they do not launch upon the ignotum 
mare with a shadow of that prophetic belief which 
girded up the heart of Columbus. Most religion- 
mongers have baited their paradises with a bit of 
toasted cheese. They have tempted the body with 
large promise of possessions in their transmortal 
El Dorado. Sancho Panza will not quit his chim- 
ney-corner but under promise of imaginary islands 
to govern. For my own part, I think it wiser to 
make the spirit a staff for the body, than the body 
for the spirit. When the vessel casts oif for the 
voyage, and the body finds itself left behind, it 
may well cry out and disturb the whole vicinage 
with the story of its wrong. 

PHILIP. 

I agree with you that the body is treated with 
quite too much ceremony and respect. Even religion 
has vailed its politic hat to it, till, like Christopher 
Sly, it is metamorphosed, in its own estimation, from 
a tinker to a duke. Men who would, without com- 
punction, kick a living beggar, will yet stand in awe 



CHAUCER, 105 

of his poor carcass after all that rendered it truly 
venerable has fled out of it. We agree with the old 
barbarian epitaph which affirmed that the handful of 
dust had been Ninus ; as if that which convicts us of 
mortality and weakness could at the same time endow 
us with our high prerogative of kingship over them. 
South, in one of his sermons, tells us of certain men 
whose souls are of no worth, but as salt to keep their 
bodies from putrefying. I fear that the soul is too 
often regarded in this sutler fashion. Why should 
men ever be afraid to die, but that they regard the 
spirit as secondary to that which is but its mere 
appendage and conveniency, its symbol, its word, 
its means of visibility ? If the soul lose this poor 
mansion of hers by the sudden conflagration of 
disease, or by the slow decay of age, is she there- 
fore houseless and shelterless ? If she cast away 
this soiled and tattered garment, is she therefore 
naked ? A child looks forward to his new suit, 
and dons it joyfully ; we cling to our rags and 
foulness. We should welcome Death as one who 
brings us tidings of the finding of long-lost titles to 
a large family estate, and set out gladly to take 
possession, though, it may be, not without a nat- 
ural tear for the humbler home we are leaving. 
Death always means us a kindness, though he has 
often a gruff way of offering it. Even if the soul 
never returned from that chartless and unmapped 
country, which I do not believe, I would take Sir 
John Davies's reason as a good one : 



lo6 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

" But, as Noah's pigeon, which returned no more, 
Did show she footing found, for all the flood ; 
So, when good souls, departed through death's door, 
Come not again, it shows their dwelling good." 

The realm of Death seems an enemy's country 
to most men, on whose shores they are loathly 
driven by stress of weather ; to the wise man it is 
the desired port where he moors his bark gladly, 
as in some quiet haven of the Fortunate Isles ; it 
is the golden west into which his sun sinks, and, 
sinking, casts back a glory upon the leaden cloud- 
rack which had darkly besieged his day. 

After all, the body is a more expert dialectician 
than the soul, and buffets it, even to bewilderment, 
with the empty bladders of logic ; but the soul can 
retire from the dust and turmoil of such conflict 
to the high tower of instinctive faith, and there, in 
hushed serenity, take comfort of the sympathizing 
stars. We look at death through the cheap-glazed 
windows of the flesh, and believe him for the mon- 
ster which the flawed and crooked glass presents 
him. You say truly that we have w^asted time in 
trying to coax the body into a faith in what, by its 
very nature, it is incapable of comprehending. 
Hence a plethoric, short-winded kind of belief, 
that can walk at any easy pace over the smooth 
plain, but loses breath at the first sharp uphill of 
life. How idle is it to set a sensual bill of fare 
before the soul, acting over again the old story of 
the crane and the fox ! 



CHA UCER. 



107 



JOHN. 

1 know not when we shall hear pure spiritualism 
preached by the authorized expounders of doctrine. 
These have suffered the grain to mildew, while 
they have been wrangling about the husks of form ; 
and the people have stood by, hungry and half- 
starved, too intent on the issue of the quarrel to 
be conscious that they were trampling the forgot- 
ten and scattered bread of life in the mire. Thank 
Heaven, they may still pluck ripe ears of God's 
own planting and watering in the fields ! 

In the conclusion to Raleigh's "History of the 
World," there is a passage concerning Death which 
rolls on with the muffled grandeur of a funeral march. 
There is something in it which always affects me 
strangely. I must repeat it to you. 

*' O eloquent, just, and mighty Death ! whom none could 
advise, thou hast persuaded ; what none hath dared, thou 
hast done ; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only 
hast cast out of the world and despised ; thou hast drawn 
together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, 
and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two 
narrow words, — Hie Jacet ! " 

PHILIP. 

Magnificent, truly ! — I have but one more prom- 
ise yet to fulfil, and that is to read you an extract 
from *' Troilus and Creseide," modernized by Words- 
worth. I shall select a few verses, leaving you to 
read the rest at your leisure. After Cressid has left 



Io8 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

Troy, Troilus goes in secret to see once more her 
house, where they had been wont to meet. 

" Then said he thus : — ' O palace desolate ! 
O house of houses, once so richly dight ! 
O palace empty and disconsolate ! 
Thou lamp, of which extinguished is the light ! 
O palace, whilom day, that now art night ! 
Thou ought'st to fall, and I to die, since she 
Is gone who held us both in sovereignty. 

** * O of all houses once the crowned boast ! 
Palace illumined with the sun of bliss ! 
O ring, of which the ruby now is lost ! 

cause of woe, that cause hast been of bliss ! 
Yet, since I may no better, would I kiss 
Thy cold doors ; but I dare not for this rout : 
Farewell, thou shrine, of which the saint is out ! ' 

" Forth from the spot he rideth up and down, 
And everything to his rememberance 
Came, as he rode by places of the town 
Where he had felt such perfect pleasure once. 
* Lo, yonder saw I mine own lady dance, 
And in that temple she with her bright eyes, 
My lady dear, first bound me captivewise ; 

" * And yonder, with joy-smitten heart, have I 
Heard my own Cressid's laugh ; and once at play 

1 yonder saw her eke full blissfully ; 
And yonder once she unto me 'gan say, 

** Now, my sweet Troilus, love me well, I pray! " 
And there so graciously did me behold, 
That hers unto the death my heart I hold. 



CHA UCER. 

" ' And at the corner of that selfsame house 
Heard I my most beloved lady dear, 
So womanly, with voice melodious 
Singing so well, so goodly, and so clear. 
That in my soul, methinks, I yet do hear 
The blissful sound ; and in that very place 
My lady first me took unto her grace.' 

*' Another time he took into his head 
That every wight, who in the way passed by, 
Had of him ruth, and fancied that they said, 

* I am right sorry Troilus will die ! ' 

• •••••••• 

'* And every night, as he was wont to do, 

Troilus stood the bright moon to behold ; 
And all his trouble to the moon he told, 
And said, * I wis, when thou art horned anew, 
I shall be glad if all the world be true.' 

• •••.*••• 
** Upon the walls, fast also would he walk. 

To the end that he the Grecian host might see ; 
And ever thus he to himself would talk : — 

* Lo, yonder is mine own bright lady free ; 
Or yonder is it that the tents must be ; 

And thence doth come this air, that is so sweet 
That in my heart I feel the joy of it. 

** * And certainly this wind, that more and more, 
By moments, thus increaseth in my face. 
Is of my lady's sighs heavy and sore : 
I prove it thus ; for, in no other space, 
Of all this town, save only in this place. 
Feel I a wind that soundeth so like pain ; 
It saith, '* Alas ! why severed are we twain ? " ' 



109 



j> 



no FIRST CONVERSATION, 

I venture to say that you know nothing in Eng- 
lish (and if not in that, surely in no other lan- 
guage) rarer in its kind than this. I have made 
only one change in it, a merely literal one, substi- 
tuting " doth '^ for '* does," in the sixth line of the 
last stanza but one. The euphony of the verse 
seemed to me to demand it. And this leads us back 
again to the beginning of our conversation. Here 
is an archaism which the rabble of sibilant sounds in 
our language not only excuses, but renders neces- 
sary, even if an argument might not be legitimately 
drawn from the loss which melody feels in the ban- 
ishment of the soft termination th, 

JOHN. 

What a sweet fancy is that of Troilus about the 
wind ! It reminds one of Romeo. I agree with 
you about the termination th^ nor do I think that 
these little niceties and refinements of language are 
beneath the dignity of serious study and argument. 
A stray hair, by its continued irritation, may give 
more annoyance than a smart blow. 

PHILIP. 

In many words this termination is necessary to 
give sufficient prolongation to the sound, as in 
** linger-eth," *' murmur-eth," " wander-eth," '* abid- 
eth," words denoting a continuance of action, and 
which are defrauded of their just amount of expres- 
sion by being squeezed into a compacter form, and 
set off with the fizz of an s at the end, as in 



CHA UCER. 1 1 1 

*« wanders,"' <* murmurs," and ** lingers." Where 
plaintiveness of tone is demanded, the sweet gravity 
of this termination should always plead for its use. 
It is one of the excellencies of our language. In 
some words it were manifestly out of place, as in 
"whistles," "stops," "hisses," "slides." In the 
dramatic form, too, it should be sparingly employed. 
There we mostly want directness, plainness, and 
force, and such exquisiteness would seem like finery 
and foppishness. The sentiment, demanding, as it 
always does, the keenest and most delicate sympathy 
from the diction, must decide without appeal in such 
cases. Milton shows the sensitiveness of his ear 
most in his earlier poems, especially in " Comus " 
and " Lycidas." It is remarkable that his blindness 
seems rather to have lessened than increased this 
faculty in him. Perhaps our noble philanthrope. Dr. 
Howe, could explain this. His " Samson Agon- 
istes " is singularly harsh and unmusical, and often 
far less metrical than the sonorous and enthusiastical 
sentences which jut out continually above the level of 
his prose. Coleridge well expressed Shakspeare's 
mastery over language when he said that you could 
no more detrude a word from one of his verses than 
you could push out a brick from the side of a house 
with your finger. Sometimes the language of a whole 
play seems to be pervaded and tempered by a prevail- 
ing sentiment. I have always thought so of that 
most sombre of his tragedies, " Richard the Second." 
There is little of his Titanic, heaven-scaling boldness 
of metaphor and expression in it ; all is grave, sub- 



112 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

dued, and mournful, and you read it under your 
voice, as if in a funeral chamber. 

I fear that I have spoken too harshly of the letter 
s. It often adds much to the expression of a verse, 
— in the word *' silence," for example. It is only by 
the contrast of some slight noise that we can appreci- 
ate silence. A solitude is never so lonely as when 
the wind sio^hs throuo:h it. This is suo^o-ested to the 

O O Oc_> 

ear, and so to the imagination, by the sound of the 
word. Keats, therefore, did well in bringing together 
such a cohort of ^-s in the opening of his * * Hy- 
perion " : 



(( 



Deep in the ^hady Jtillnei"i" of a vale, 
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, 
Far from the fiery noon and eve'i" one ^tar, 
S2X gray-haired ^Vaturn, silent a^ a i-tone, 
6'till a^ the ^ilen<;e round about hii* lair." 



Do you not feel it? The whole passage, for some 
distance farther on, is full of this sighing melody, 
and so impresses me with its utter loneliness and de- 
sertion that, after repeating it to myself when alone, 
I am relieved to hear the companionable flicker of the 
fire, or the tinkling fall of an ember. The same is 
observable in the first lines of Drummond's Tenth 
Sonnet, and, indeed, throughout the whole of it : 

'•'- Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest, 
Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings 
Indifferent host to shepherds and to kings." 



CHA UCER, 1 1 3 

Here we feel a kind of hushing sound, as if prel- 
uding sleep, conveyed by the i^-s and the ^-s. You 
must remember that I am speaking of silence as it 
impresses the ear only ; for its effect often receives 
a reinforcement from he eye also, as in the African 
deserts, which, though they seem the very extreme 
of stillness by day, when the eye can appreciate their 
utter loneliness, would not appear more hushed than 
this room in thorough darkness. In the same way 
that we estimate silence by contrast with the nearest 
possible approach to it in sound, do we measure 
darkness by a similar comparison with light. This 
Milton felt when he said, 

^' No light, but rather darkness visible ; " 

which could not be, except for some presence of 
light, like that which Spenser, impressed with the 
same feeling, calls 

*' A \ii\.\Q glooming light, 7nuch like a shade, ^^ 

There is a passage also in Thompson (who had a 
very nice ear) which is in point. You will see how 
he changes from the roughness of the r to the 
smooth glide of the s. 

*' At last, the roused-up river pours along: 
Resistless, roaring, dreadful, down it comes, 
From the rude mountain and the mossy wild, 
Tumbling through rocks abrupt, and sounding far ; 
Then o'er the sanded valley floating spreads, 
Calm, sluggish, silent." 



114 



FIRST CONVERSATION, 



So, likewise, in the first four stanzas of CoUins's 
most delicious '' Ode to Evening," an ode impreg- 
nated with deep calm, and the verses of which seem 
like the arches of some deserted cloister, each grow- 
ing silenter as you enter farther into their dim seclu- 
sion. I could easily cite passages from Shakspeare 
and Spenser, to show that they well understood this 
secret. In the word *' rustle," and others of the 
same kind, the s is full of meaning. Hawthorne, 
who has a right in any gathering of poets, will give 
me an example. It is from his wonderful '* Hollow 
of the Three Hills." 

*^ Before them went the priest, reading the burial-ser- 
vice, while the leaves of his book were rustling in the 
breeze." 

The expression of the passage suffers by its being 
torn away from its context. An air of silence per- 
vades the whole. It is this property of the letter s to 
give a feeling of stillness, or of such faint sounds as 
would be heard only when everything else is hushed, 
that takes away all force from words like ' ' disson- 
ance," which Milton sometimes introduces, as I think, 
unwisely, — as in this passage from '* Comus " : 

'' The wonted roar was up amongst the woods, 
And filled the air with barbarous dissonance ^"^^ 

where it does not at all harmonize with the immedi- 
ately preceding '' roar." 

After all, it seems to me that there is no European 



CHAUCER. 115 

language so rich in words that echo the sense and 
feeling as the English. The modern French assume 
a great license in inventing words of this kind, but 
their newness and want of previous association rob 
them of much of their force. We, it is true, have 
cheated the r of half its dignity ; but in the Italian, 
where it is indulged and petted, it often disturbs 
much better company with its licensed brabblings. 

There is no deeper study than this of words ; and 
I have found in many an otherwise dull and muddy 
old folio the amplest repayment, when I have met in 
it a single hint to the clearer understanding of this 
mystery. What book are you searching the shelves 
for? 

JOHN. 

Gray's Letters . There is a passage in one of them 
on the subject of the resurrection of old words, which 
is to the point. I suppose I must allow the authority 
of so classical a writer, though it tell against the 
opinion I expressed in the first part of to-day's con- 
versation. Here it is : 

'* Our poetry has a language peculiar to itself; to which 
almost every one that has written has added something by 
enriching it with foreign idioms and derivatives, nay, 
sometimes words of their own composition or invention. 
Shakspeare and Milton have been great creators this way; 
and no one more licentious than Pope or Dryden, who 
perpetually borrow from the former. . . . Our lan- 
guage, not being a settled thing (like the French), has 
an undoubted right to words of an hundred years old, pro- 
vided antiquity have not rendered them unintelligible. In 



Ii6 FIRST CONVERSATION, 

truth, Shakspeare's language is one of his principal beau- 
ties, and he has no less advantage over your Addisons and 
Rowes in this, than in those other great excellences you 
mention." ^ 

PHILIP. 

Had Gray been as untrammelled in his poetry as 
in his prose, he would have been as delightful as 
Goldsmith. Well, we have, as usual when we come 
together, talked a little about everything. We should 
have hardly pleased Pythagoras, who enjoined a five- 
years' silence, and whose disciples, as Athenasus 
relates, were wont to hold fishes in high esteem for 
their taciturnity. 

" To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new." 
1 Letter LIL, to Mr. West. 



SECOND CONVERSATION. 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 



JOHN. 

I BELIEVE it was Dr. Johnson (surely it was no 
poet) who first said that all good poetry could be 
translated into as good prose. It is plain that he 
saw no distinction between the two except in the 
metre and rhyme. I should judge so, at least, from 
his own verses. 

PHILIP. 

He meant that all poetry must be translatable into 
" common sense," that popular altar upon whose 
horns dulness and prejudice are so ready to cling. 
But how is Pegasus better than a dray-horse with 
this market-cart trundling behind him? Doubtless 
some of the truest poetry has been written without 
either rhyme or metre ; but it has lacked one of its 
highest adornments and one which the most poetical 
thoughts demand. Metre and rhyme are wings to 
the artist and crutches to the artificer ; they may lift 
the one to a more empyreal vantage-ground, but they 
will only change the natural gait of the other for a 
hobble. The grandest and most noble part of poetry 
is independent of them. Yet, wanting these, a poem 
will want the completeness of its effect. I believe 

117 



Il8 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

both of them to be the instinctive desires of the 
most amply poetical spirits. I could cite many 
poems which would be nothing without them, yet 
which have the blessed power to lead my heart into 
the cool stillness of memory or to the breezy head- 
lands of hope. 

JOHN. 

Prose may do the same. 

PHILIP. 

Ay, but not so cheaply and simply. It is a great 
gift to be able to conceive and express those thoughts 
which entice us out of the actual into the ideal ; a 
yet greater one to utter such as teach us to unite the 
two ; but surely that is the gr'eatest -gift of all which 
superadds to these a keener and more refined de- 
light. There are moods, too, in which pleasurable 
emotion is all that the mind is capable of, and the 
power of bestowing this merely is not to be con- 
temned. Beauty is always use. The acanthus leaves 
of the capital do not help the pillar as a support, and 
yet I think that even the iconoclastic hammer of 
strictest utilitarianism might consistently spare them. 
There are passages in Milton's prose which fall be- 
low his poetry only for want of the majestic grace of 
his metre. They make life seem fairer to me, they 
give my heart a manlier brace ; but I am conscious 
of a barrenness in them which I had never known, 
perhaps, had he not himself betrayed it to me by that 
more lavish splendor of his verse ever changeful, ever 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 119 

new, pavilioning his thoughts like the cloud arches 
of a sunset. 

JOHN. 

If Swift were right when he called him the great- 
est benefactor of mankind who made two blades of 
grass grow where one grew before, I would give no 
mean place to the bestower of a new flower. What- 
ever has given the spirit a fresh delight has estab- 
lished for itself a fair title in fee simple to the room 
it has taken up on our planet. Your business to-day 
is to prove the title of the Old Dramatists. 

PHILIP. 

Those are the greatest poets who have expressed 
the largest number of our common thoughts con- 
cisely and portably. By conciseness I would not be 
understood to mean a Spartan and niggardly brevity, 
or that tight-laced affectation which puts a full stop 
in place of a comma and makes expression pant and 
breathe short. If we tie a bundle too tightly our 
packthread is apt to break, and we lose our pains. 
Feeling and diction soon lose their healthy color 
when they are imprisoned together in too narrow a 
cell. That style is the most concise which expresses 
a thought best, whether it be in few or many words. 
A painter would choose a larger canvas, and charge 
his palette with richer and more varied colors, to 
paint a sunset than to paint a mouse ; yet the one 
would be as truly concise as the other. Simplicity 
is neither plain nor bald. 



I20 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

JOHN. 

No. A ray of light seems simple enough, and yet 
is made up of all the primary colors. 

PHILIP. 

And light is the symbol of truth. As every sub- 
stance absorbs that part of the pure ray which its 
nature and constitution desire, and becomes colored 
accordingly, so is it with language. Every word has 
a hue of its own which is its meaning, and a just 
combination of these, whether more or fewer, re- 
produces that whole of which each is a part, and the 
general effect is light. The same is true of ideas ; 
and every man is more or less a poet in proportion 
as he has an instinctive understanding of this beau- 
tiful and harmonious chromatic chord. To refine a 
little farther, it is also equally true of the sound of 
words. Every one has its proper correlative in color, 
and may be almost mathematically demonstrated to 
be in or out of tune. 

JOHN. 

One would think, then, that a mathematical mind 
should excel alike in poetry, painting, and music, 
and that Euclid, had he been so minded, might 
have combined the excellencies of Shakspeare, 
Raphael, and Beethoven. 

PHILIP. 

Not more truly than the prism, in giving us the 
same colors, can satisfy and conciliate the eye like 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 121 

the rainbow. I am not sure, however (since the 
faculty of analysis is so main an element in the mind 
of the artist), that any one of the great trio you 
have named might not have made a good mathema- 
tician. Chaucer, when in prison, wrote a treatise on 
the astrolabe for his son. Pythagoras, who seems to 
have had a truly poetical nature, made discoveries in 
the science of numbers ; Goethe, in colors, in bot-^ 
any, and in anatomy ; and Coleridge tells us that 
Davy, if he had not chosen to be a great chemist, 
would have been a great poet. But analysis must 
be a subordinate faculty or the man instead of being 
an artist becomes an imitator, using the same means 
which others have employed, mathematically rather 
than instinctively. 

JOHN. 

This harmony between sound and color and 
(you would add) thought is a very enticing one for 
speculation. I had often noticed that particular 
musical notes gave me a sensation of colors, and was 
wont to apply it to some action of the associative 
principle too fine for me to trace the links, till I 
reflected that neither the organ of smell (which has 
the most powerful effect on our association with 
places) nor that of taste was at all excited. When I 
afterwards found that there was a fixed law in the 
matter I was, for a time, in an ecstasy. I could now 
understand why it was that certain pieces of music, 
though there were no discords in the performance of 
them, were yet very unpleasing to me. The want of 
harmony was between the different parts. It was as 



122 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

if, in a large picture, the painter should have had the 
colors of each figure, or of each group, in tune, and 
yet, failing to keep the other groups in proper har- 
mony, should make his whole canvas jar upon the 
eye. I remember being very much interested in a 
book upon the theory of colors, in which was a dia- 
gram of the musical chromatic scale. The illustra- 
tions were drawn from our English poets, especially 
Shakspeare, who was shown never to have struck a 
false note. Truly, as Falstaff says, *' this instinct is 
a great matter." Many of the great painters have 
been also musicians. Raphael and Gerard Douw 
have painted themselves in this character. Musical 
concerts were a favorite subject of Correggio's pencil. 
Gainsborough was as passionately fond of his 'viol da 
gamba as of his paints and brushes ; and you would 
probably say that it was the same quality of mind 
that made him a great painter which, possessed in a 
more limited degree, made his younger brother a 
distinguished mechanician. Benvenuto Cellini, I 
think, mentions Michel Angelo's love of music, and 
was himself no mean performer. Salvator Rosa must 
have had a sensitive ear, or he would never have 
been so expert an zjnprovvisatore . Doubtless a book 
of reference would furnish us with many more ex- 
amples. Allston was as fond of hearing the rich 
voice of his niece as Luther was of his son John's. 
Page has a delicate appreciation of the finest music ; 
and I know one, of whose genius as a sculptor I feel 
well assured,* who is a proficient in the science. The 

1 W. W. Story, who if he keeps the promise of the first bust he 
has exhibited may soon write himself artis maltster. 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 



123 



fondness of the painters for St. Cecilia, too, should 
not be forgotten. Fuseli understood the chromatic 
force of words as well as of colors, and has left, per- 
haps, the best descriptive criticism on pictures which 
we have. Allston^s forthcoming volume of lectures 
will, I doubt not, prove him also a master of the 
effects of language. Nor have the poets shown less 
fondness for the sister art. Homer several times has 
a kind word for the singers. In the eighth book of 
the ** Odyssey," for instance, 

* ^ Tzaai yap avdpcdizoLGiv ETnxQovioLGiv , aoiSol 
rcjUTJg ejLLjLLopoi elac kol aldovg.''^ 

But this may be professional. Shakspeare betrays 
it often. Milton played upon the organ, a congenial 
instrument. Izaak Walton has recorded Herbert's 
musical prospensity and skill, and Cowper himself tells 
of his own fondness for Mrs. Un win's harpsichord. 
Goldsmith's flute played the interpreter for him, and 
paid his way through France. Collins, one of our 
richest colorists, was passionately fond of music. 
Now that I have indulged in this refinement of fancy 
so far, why might I not carry it a step farther, and at 
once admit form as well as color into this musical 
party ? 

PHILIP. 

You have unconsciously done so already, by your 
allusions to sculptors. Vitruvius tells us that archi- 
tects should know something of music, and you 
remember Madame De StaeTs celebrated fancy. If 



124 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

I knew enough of music I might, perhaps, find nice 
analogies between its styles and those of architecture. 
D wight, who has at once so profound and refined a 
perception in whatever relates to music, could trace 
them for us with enthusiastic demonstration. The 
parallel between some of the architectural and the 
poetical styles has often struck me. The Grecian 
corresponds to the Epic, in its severe majesty, its reg- 
ular columns, and its images, calm and large like 
those of gods. 

JOHN. 

I see that Milton has usurped to himself the whole 
definition of ''epic" in your dictionary. Homer^s 
" Iliad," with its rapidly shifting scenes, its alarums 
and incursions, differs from the '* Paradise Lost "as 
widely as Mozart's music from Handel's. Still farther 
apart stands the picturesque and romantic " Odyssey," 
with its Calypso and Circe, its Lotophagi and Lestry- 
gons and Cyclops, and the homely glimpse of old 
Argus, which delighted our childhood. The Nibelun- 
gen song is more like this. It is quite as much Gothic 
as Grecian. By the way, I wish that Professor 
Felton would give us an edition of the " Odyssey" 
uniform with his "Iliad." I cannot help liking it 
the better of the two. 

. PHILIP. 

We should never look below the best for a stand- 
ard, and I shall keep fast hold of Milton still. The 
Drama, in its highest form, the tragedy, is fitly 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 125 

symbolled by the Gothic, having its fixed rules, 
indeed, but admitting of lyrical adornment, and of 
the quaint corbels of humor, here and there, leering, 
perhaps, over a tomb, the proper types of Shak- 
speare's clown. The Lyric, again, may find its 
parallel among the light and graceful buildings of the 
Moors. 

JOHN. 

We have dwelt long enough among these sublima- 
tions, almost as impalpable as the Greek poet^s 
" dream of the shadow of a smoke.*' It is well 
enough to shape likenesses in the changing outline 
of a cloud ; but if we embrace one, we shall only, 
like Ixion, beget a monster. 

PHILIP. 

I believe that you have been seduced from your 
allegiance solely by that plausible metaphor. But it 
will betray you in turn ; for you have forgotten that 
one of the nephelid offspring of that Olympian in- 
trigue was the instructor of the greatest heroes of 
antiquity, nay, of the scientific god of medicine him- 
self. A metaphor, if the correspondence be perfect 
in all its parts, is one of the safest guides through 
the labyrinth of truth ; but should there chance to 
be a break in the thread, we are left without a clew 
in the more inextricable maze into which we have 
suffered it to lead us. As to our sublimations, I 
will rebuke you out of the mouth of Sir Thomas 
Browne, who says, " I love to lose myself in a 



126 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

mystery ; to pursue my reason to an O Altitudo ! " — 
to which I heartily assent. 

JOHN. 

If poetry be not out of place in the train of these 
(shall I call them philosophical?) refinements, I 
should be glad to think myself a day's journey nearer 
to the " golden stronde " of the dramatists. 

PHILIP. 

You might open them almost anywhere, and find 
an oracle to your purpose. True poetry is never out 
of place, nor will a good word spoken for her ever 
fail of some willing and fruitful ear. Even under our 
thin crust of fashion and frivolity throb the undying 
fires of the great soul of man, the fountain and centre 
of all poetry, and which will one day burst forth to 
wither like grass-blades the vain temples and palaces 
which forms and conventionalities have heaped 
smotheringly upon it. Behind the blank faces of the 
weak and thoughtless I see, sometimes with a kind 
of dread, this awful and mysterious presence, as I 
have seen one of Allston's paintings in a ball-room, 
overlooking with its serene and steadfast eyes the 
butterfly throng beneath, and seeming to gaze, from 
these narrow battlements of time, far out into the 
infinite promise of the future, beholding there the 
free, erect, and perfected soul. 

JOHN. 

Ah, you have climbed upon the saddle of your 
Pegasus again^ and will leave me far behind you. 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 127 

Mention poetry, or anti-slavery, and you go suddenly 
mad, though in ordinary matters a reasonable fellow 
enough. They are as fruitful a text to you as the 
'* Kaim o' Kimprunes " to Mr. Oldbuck. I like your 
enthusiasm very well, but you sometimes jumble 
them together oddly enough. 

PHILIP. 

You forget that I believe the poetical sentiment 
and what we call the sentiment of natural religion to 
be identical. Both of them are life-members of the 
New England Anti- Slavery Society. You are at 
heart as much an Abolitionist as I ; and if you were 
not, I should suspect the purity of my own principles 
if they built up a wall between me and my brother. 
No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy 
of a single human being ; for that is a capacity in 
which he is by nature unfitted to shine. It may, 
and must, rouse opposition ; but that philanthropy 
has surely a flaw in it which cannot sympathize with 
the oppressor equally as with the oppressed. It is the 
high and glorious vocation of Poesy as well to make 
our own daily life and toil more beautiful and holy to 
us by the divine ministerings of love as to render us 
swift to convey the same blessing to our brother. 
Poesy is love's chosen apostle, and the very almoner 
of God. She is the home of the outcast and the 
wealth of the needy. For her the hut becomes a 
palace, whose halls are guarded by the gods of 
Phidias, and kept peaceful by the maid-mothers of 
Raphael. She loves better the poor wanderer whose 



128 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

bare feet know by heart all the freezing stones of the 
pavement than the delicate maiden for whose dainty 
soles Brussels and Turkey have been over-careful ; 
and I doubt not but some remembered scrap of child- 
ish song hath often been a truer alms than all the 
benevolent societies could give. She is the best 
missionary, knowing when she may knock at the door 
of the most curmudgeonly hearts without being turned 
away unheard. The omnipresence of her spirit is 
beautifully and touchingly expressed in " The Poet," 
one of the divisions of a little volume of poems by 
Cornelius Mathews. Were the whole book as simple 
in thought and diction as the most of this particular 
poem, I know few modern volumes that would equal 
it. Let me read you the passage I alluded to. You 
will see that the poor slave is not forgotten. 

*' There sits not on the wilderness's edge, 

In the dusk lodges of the wintry North, 
Nor couches in the rice-field's slimy sedge, 

Nor on the cold, wide waters ventures forth, — 
Who waits not, in the pauses of his toil, 

With hope that spirits in the air may sing ; 
Who upward turns not, at propitious times, 

Breathless, his silent features listening, 
In desert and in lodge, on marsh and main, 
To feed his hungry heart and conquer pain." 

JOHN. 

Worthy of the fine imagination and the classic 
taste of Collins ; though he would have found fault, 
I suspect, with the assonance of "sits not" and 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 



129 



<* waits not," coming in as they do, also, in the same 
place in their respective verses. But these are trifles. 
No man ought to stop, looking for motes in such a 
beaker of pure Hippocrene as this. These lines 
express a truth, and, in such utterance, the mind 
does not linger, daintily picking choice phrase, as it 
does for the decking out of a fancy. Truth comes 
huddling forth like molten iron, which, though it be 
beautified by the little swarms of bee-like sparks 
which hover around it, yet runs into the nearest 
channel and there soon hardens, taking the chance 
shape of its mould. 

PHILIP. 

Those verses do, indeed, express a truth. The 
love of the beautiful and true, like the dewdrop in 
the heart of the crystal, remains forever clear and 
liquid in the inmost shrine of man's being, though all 
the rest be turned to stone by sorrow and degrada- 
tion. The angel who has once come down into 
the soul will not be driven thence by any sin or 
baseness even, much less by any undeserved oppres- 
sion or wrong. At the souPs gate sits she silently, 
with folded hands and downcast eyes ; but at the 
least touch of nobleness those patient orbs are 
serenely uplifted, and the whole spirit is lightened 
with their prayerful lustre. Over all life broods 
Poesy, like the calm, blue sky with its motherly, 
rebuking face. She is the true preacher of the 
Word, and when in time of danger and trouble the 
established shepherds have cast down their crooks 



130 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

and fled, she tenderly careth for the flock. On her 
calm and fearless heart rests weary freedom, when 
all the world have driven her from the door with 
scoffs and mockings. From her white breasts flows 
the strong milk which nurses our heroes and martyrs ; 
and she blunts the sharp tooth of the fire, makes 
the axe edgeless, and dignifies the pillory or the 
gallows. She is the great reformer, and where the 
love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and 
wrong cannot long prevail. The more this love is 
cultivated and refined, the more do men strive to 
make their outward lives rhythmical and harmonious, 
that they may accord with that inward and dominant 
rhythm by whose key the composition of all noble 
and worthy deeds is guided. To make one object, 
in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single 
heart is reward enough for a life ; for the more sym- 
pathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by 
so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which 
is most beautiful, — the human soul. Love never 
contracts its circles ; they widen by as fixed and 
sure a law as those around a pebble cast into still 
water. The angel of love, when, full of sorrow, he 
followed the first exiles, behind whom the gates of 
Paradise shut with that mournful clang, of which 
some faint echo has lingered in the hearts of all their 
offspring, unwittingly snapped off and brought away 
in his hand the seed-pod of one of the never-fading 
flowers which grew there. Into all dreary and deso- 
late places fell some of its blessed kernels ; they 
asked but little soil to root themselves in, and in this 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 131 

narrow patch of our poor clay they sprang most 
quickly and sturdily. Gladly they grew, and from 
them all time has been sown with whatever gives a 
higher hope to the soul, or makes life nobler and 
more godlike ; while from the overarching sky of 
poesy, sweet dew forever falls, to nurse and keep 
them green and fresh from the world's dust. 

JOHN. 

If a drop or two from the phial of my unassisted 
reason — which you, I fear, would leave in some dark 
corner upon the shelf, while you are playing off your 
experiments with the brighter-hued fluids of the 
laboratory — be competent to precipitate the theory 
which you have dissolved in so splendid a commix- 
ture, I should guess that your notion of the good in- 
fluence of poetry amounts simply to this, — that it 
maintains the sway of the heart over the intellect. 
The intellect has only one failing, which, to be sure, 
is a very considerable one ; it has no conscience. 
Napoleon is the readiest instance of this. If his 
heart had borne any proportion to his brain he had 
been one of the greatest men in all history. As it 
is, his triumphs are of the intellect merely, which 
memory, indeed, may wonder at, but will never love. 
He will go down to posterity as a deformity ; like 
one of those hideous caricatures in plaster, of which 
his countrymen are so fond (a noticeable fact, by 
the way, and illustrative of national character), 
whose chief characteristic is a monstrous head out of 
all proportion to the other members. That athletic 



132 



SECOND CONVERSATION. 



intellect, its huge muscles hardened and tutored by 
long training, and grim with the proud dust of un- 
numbered victories in the wrestling-ring, became 
weak as a child in the gripe of the sturdy, honest 
heart of England. Whatever magnanimity he has 
shown has in it an ugly, corrupting spot of fore- 
thought, and seems rather the result of intention 
than of instinct ; as if he were constraining himself 
into a heroic attitude, to be modelled in a statue for 
posterity. The intellect can never be great, save in 
pupilage to the heart. Nay, it can never be truly 
strong but so. It suspects and mistrusts itself at 
every turn, and gives way ignominiously at last. Its 
sole lust is for power, won it matters not how, and 
of whatever kind or degree. And it cheats itself, 
too, fancying its straw a spear like a weavers beam, 
and strutting ridiculous vriXh its twig sceptre and 
paper crown. It is because politics have been 
reo:arded as an intellectual science that thev have 
become so proverbially dishonest. The politicians 
juggle on, buying power at any rate, till the great 
lubberly national conscience, which their buzzings 
have lulled asleep, wakens with a portentous yawn, 
and brushes the whole infesting swarm into blank 
oblivion. Could we but find a statesman with a 
poet's eye ! Burke had but a narrow miss of it. 
It is only the intellect that can be thoroughly and 
hideouslv wicked. It can fors^et evervthins: in the 
attainment of its ends. The heart recoils; in its 
retired places some drops of childhood's dew still 
linger, defying manhood's fiery noon ; it remembers ; 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 



133 



it forecasts ; it dares not leap the black chasm of the 
life to come. The intellect is haunted in its lonely 
moments by its weird sisters, whose promises of 
sway entice it on from one foul deed to another. 
What an intellect was Napoleon's ! He was the 
Goethe of the throne and the camp. And that huge 
structure which he piled with such wasteful pains was 
but like the winter palaces of the Czar, being reared 
by the intellect alone, of its icy blocks, crystal, far- 
shining, yet no match for the silent eye of that all- 
beholding sun of mankind's moral sense. What 
pang of the world's sore-distressed heart did he 
make the lighter? What gleam of sunshine streamed 
into the dim hovel of our race the more freely and 
bounteously for him? The great intellect dies with 
its possessor ; the great heart, though his name in 
whose breast it had its ebb and flow be buried in the 
mouldered past, survives forever, beckoning kindred 
natures to deeds of heroic trust and self-sacrifice. Is 
Luther dead while Garrison still lives? The intel- 
lect would fain bargain with and outwit the future ; 
the heart buys acceptance of it with a simple smile. 
This, then, is the great errand of the poet ; to keep 
alive our fealty to the heart, and, even when it has 
been banished by the usurping intellect, to rouse our 
loyalty with the despised, and therefore unmolested, 
persuasion of a song 

PHILIP. 

What you say is true. The intellect, so it be at 
work, cares not much for what end. It is forever 



134 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

moulding with its restless fingers the clay within its 
reach, and shapes with almost equal pleasure an 
Apollo or a Priapus. But they err who assert that 
what we humanly call great must of need be virtuous. 
For the intellect may seduce the heart, and so, even 
by wicked means, create something that shall last. 
This was the case with Voltaire, whose omnipotent 
sneer, evil in itself, did good as well as evil. To 
me one of the most interesting relics of Napoleon is 
that table-talk of his in his island jail. A kind of 
Coleridge-Machiavel, he says something noticeable 
about everything, scrawling the aphoristic commen- 
taries of a general with the cramped precision of an 
orderly-sergeant. Well, a conversation is like a 
Classical Dictionary, where, at the end of every sub- 
ject, a vide directs you to some other, till you might 
as well attempt to read Hesiod's stupid *' Theogony." 
Let us come back to our old Dramatists. 

JOHN. 

The Old English Dramatists ! with what a vague 
feeling of pride and reverence do I utter those four 
words ! Entering the enchanted, and to me almost 
untravelled, realm which they ''rule as their de- 
mesne," I feel like the awestruck Goth when his 
eyes drooped beneath the reverend aspects of the 
Roman Senate, and he concluded them an assembly 
of gods ; or more like him who, in searching the 
windings of a cavern, came suddenly upon King 
Arthur and his knights, seated, as of yore, about the 
renowned round-table. Silent and severe they sit. 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 



13s 



those men of the old fearless time, and gaze with 
stern eyes upon the womanly newcomer whose limbs 
have never been galled by the weary harness, and 
whose soft arm has never held the lance in rest. 

PHILIP. 

Yes ; we feel when we come among them as if 
their joys and sorrows were on a more Titanic scale 
than those of our day. It seems as if we had never 
suffered and never acted, and yet we feel a noble 
spur and willingness to endure and to do. They 
show us the dignity and strength of the soul, and, 
after reading them, the men we see in the streets 
look nobler and more manlike, and we find more 
brotherhood in their before unanswering faces. 
Their works stand among those of the moderns like 
the temples and altars of the ancient dwellers on 
this continent among the rude hovels of a race of 
descendants ignorant of their use and origin. Let 
us muse awhile in this city of the past and sketch 
roughly some of the mighty monuments yet standing 
therein. 

JOHN. 

It is a little strange that the English, all of whose 
glorious past belongs equally to us, should pity us for 
having no antiquity to look back upon, as if that, 
even were it true, would preclude us from having 
poets. Besides sharing their own history and tradi- 
tion with them we can also claim our share in the 
ancientry of this our adopted hemisphere and point 
to monuments set by which their idle Druid stones 



136 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

are but things of an hour ago. Not that the poet 
needs such obscurities to grope in or desires a greater 
antiquity than that of his own heart, in which are 
written the same wondrous oracles, uncertain, yet 
not past finding out, of which all his brethren from 
Eden downward have deciphered but a few lines. 
Wherever Shakspeare lays his plots that ruddy Eng- 
lish heart of his was the true meridian whence the 
degrees of latitude and longitude were numbered. 
Paradise and pandemonium both found room enough 
with Milton in that little house in the Artillery Walk. 
The poet who leans upon the crumbling arm of Eld 
will never himself become a part of history. When 
he crossed the threshold of his own heart he left his 
strength behind him ; and in proportion as he wanders 
farther thence he becomes remote from the hearts of 
all his kind ; his words become a dim murmur with 
no articulate syllable to claim attention from the ear. 
But I interrupt. 

PHILIP. 

You interrupt well. In the old dramatists there is 
the beauty of health, strength, and invincible sin- 
cerity. Sorrow there is, as there is in life ; but it is 
a sorrow that sympathizes with every human being, 
and is too genuine to be w^arped into a selfish and 
gloomy misanthropy. They wrote before the good 
English word " feeling" had whined itself into the 
French one, ** sentiment." They were too hardy to 
need to shelter themselves in the soft cloak of senti- 
mentalism and thought it a worthier and more poeti- 
cal ambition to emulate the angels in love than the 



CHAPMAN, 137 

devils in scorn and hate. Byronism would have 
stood with numbed limbs and chattering teeth in the 
sharp, bracing mountain air in which alone their lungs 
could find free play. Yet there amid the bare, ma- 
jestic rocks bloom tender Alpine flowers of delicatest 
hue and rarest fragrance, and the sturdy moss creeps 
everywhere with its heartfelt green which, even in 
cloudy weather, looks as if it had garnered up in 
itself a store of sunshine. 

I shall make my first selections from George Chap- 
man, author of the best translation of Homer, and 
the friend of Spenser, Shakspeare, Marlow, and 
other great spirits of his day. I shall read to you 
only those passages which have pleased me the most 
heartily, leaving you to suppose at the same time that 
I leave unread a thousand as good which do not 
happen to fit my humor as well. I shall punctuate 
and emphasize, and even change a syllable, or the 
order in which it stands, to please my own judgment 
and ear. 

JOHN. 

I like your declaration of independence, for I have 
generally found, when my reading has led me that 
way, that the labors of editors and commentators 
were like the wind Cecias, whose quality it was, 
according to Aristotle, to gather clouds rather than 
to dispel them. 

PHILIP. 

Chapman is a very irregular writer. I might liken 
him to a hoodwinked eagle, which sometimes, led 
by an ungovernable prompting of instinctive free- 



138 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

dom, soars far up into the clear ether of song and 
floats majestical on level wings where this world, 
with all its fret and turmoil, shows in the blue dis- 
tance only as a silent star, and which as suddenly 
will dash down again and almost stun himself against 
the noisy and dusty earth. This is very natural in 
one of so impulsive a temperament. His impetu- 
osity is continually bursting out in hot jets like 
little geysers, which often carry the mud and stones 
along with them toward heaven. So eager is he 
to give vent to a favorite thought or image that 
he does not heed sufficiently the intermediate steps, 
plunging along through mud and brambles till he 
reach his object. He has little dramatic power, that 
mesmerism by which Shakspeare makes his charac- 
ters speak and act his own thoughts without letting 
his own individuality appear in the matter, and his 
plays, taken as wholes, are not very interesting ; but 
they abound in grand lines and images full of an 
antique and majestic port. In didactic and moral 
passages he comes nearer to Shakspeare than does 
any one of his contemporaries. 

JOHN. 

I think I have seen Chapman somewhere charged 
with bombast, and with some show of truth, if I 
may trust some passages quoted. 

PHILIP. 

The accusation was probably laid by some critic 
who could pardon nothing which rose above the 
dead marsh level of Pope. He is rugged enough 



CHAPMAN, 



139 



sometimes, but seldom turgid. When his mind has 
once taken a turn in any direction it receives tribu- 
tary streams and runnels from every side till it foams 
and rushes along with the turbulent force of a swollen 
river. There are some minds to which all true 
poetry seems inflated ; commonwealths from which 
poets are excluded without the artificial help of a 
Platonic edict. The mass of men are so fallen from 
a true state of nature that whatever would fain recall 
them to it or presupposes it seems ridiculous and un- 
natural. Read Milton aloud on the Exchange and 
you would be laughed at, as much for what you read 
as for reading at all. The multitude take the ex- 
pression of something they have never felt for an 
absurdity or an affectation, or worse. So it is if 
they hear anything which strokes their prejudices 
the wrong way. When the King of Denmark sent 
missionaries to convert the Malabarians the Brah- 
mins expressed their entire satisfaction with the prin- 
ciples of the Christian religion except inasmuch as it 
allowed its believers to eat cow's flesh and to spit. 
An intelligent Turk who should come to this country 
with our Declaration of Independence in his head 
would be delighted and surprised to find that a man 
may carry out in his practice almost any doctrine save 
the main one which that instrument inculcates, with- 
out any fear of Autocrat Mob. He may preach des- 
potism and be respectable, Mahometanism and he 
would be run after ; but if he preach Abolitionism he 
loses caste at once. To us, on the other hand this 
seems highly natural and proper. 



140 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

JOHN. 

God's livery is a very plain one, but its wearers 
have good reason to be content. If it have not so 
much gold lace about it as Satan's it keeps out foul 
weather better and is besides a great deal cheaper. 
I do not think that you do Pope justice. His trans- 
lation of Homer is as bad as it can be, I admit, but 
surely you cannot deny the merit of lively and ingen- 
ious fancy to his '* Rape of the Lock," nor of knowl- 
edge of life and a certain polished classicalness to 
his Epistles and Satires. His portraits are like those 
of Copley, of fine gentlemen and ladies, whose silks 
and satins are the best part of them. 

PHILIP. 

I cannot allow the parallel. In Copley's best 
pictures the drapery, though you may almost hear 
it rustle, is wholly a subordinate matter. Witness 
some of those in our college-hall here at Cam- 
bridge, that of Madame Boylston especially. I re- 
member being once much struck with the remark 
of a friend who convinced me of the fact that 
Copley avoided the painting of wigs whenever he 
could, thus getting a step nearer nature. Pope 
would have made them a prominent object. I 
grant what you say about the ' * Rape of the Lock ; " 
but this does not prove that Pope was a poet. If 
you wish an instance of a poefs fancy, look into the 
** Midsummer Night's Dream." I can allow that 
Pope has written what is entertaining, but surely 



CHAPMAN, 



141 



not poetical. Show me a line that makes you love 
God and your neighbor better, that inclines you 
to meekness, charity, and forbearance, and I will 
show you a hundred that make it easier for you to 
be the odious reverse of all these. In many a 
pagan poet there is more Christianity. No poet 
could write a <* Dunciad," or even read it. You 
have persuaded yourself into thinking Pope a poet, 
as in looking for a long time at a stick which we 
believe to be an animal of some kind, we fancy 
that it is stirring. His letters are amusing, but 
do not increase one's respect for him. When you 
speak of his being classical, I am sure that you 
jest. Your favorite, Collins, is a truly classical 
writer. For classicalness does not consist in any 
amount of Latin and Greek, nor in a body-snatch- 
ing of dead forms of expression or belief. It is 
only the plain simplicity of a gentleman. A schol- 
arly air of quiet and repose, an easy dignity, and 
an unstrained grace pervade it. It may consist 
with the highest gifts of the imagination, as in the 
delightful poet I have mentioned. The critics, by 
a strange kind of metonymy, have applied it chiefly 
to the curious insipidities of the dull, or the mechanic 
inspirations of the pedantic. Chapman, though a 
fine scholar, is in no wise classical. His merri- 
ment is quite too boisterous, and his enthusiasm 
too unrestrained. When we read a classical poet, 
we feel as if we had entered a marble temple 
where a cool silence reigns ; a few quiet statues 
gleam around us, pure and naked ; a few short 



142 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

inscriptions tell of the deeds of heroes ; all is calm, 
grand, and simple to the highest perfection of art. 
But if Chapman be not classical, he has the higher 
merit of earnestness, sincerity, and rugged hearti- 
ness, not without some touches, here and there, of 
graceful tenderness and fierce sublimity. Now let 
me read to you the opening of '* Bussy D'Am- 
bois," a tragedy: 

^^ Enter BussY D'Ambois in mean apparel, 

'' Fortune, not reason, rules the state of things : 
Reward goes backward, honor on his head ; 
Who is not poor is monstrous : only need 
Gives form and worth to every human seed. 
As cedars beaten with continual storms, 
So great men flourish ; and do imitate 
Unskilful statuaries, who suppose 
(In forming a Colossus) if they make him 
Straddle enough, strut, and look big and gape, 
Their work is goodly : so men merely great 
In their affected gravity of voice. 
Sourness of countenance, manners, cruelty, 
Authority, wealth, and all the spawn of fortune, 
Think they bear all the kingdom's worth before them ; 
Yet differ not from those Colossic statues. 
Which, with heroic forms without o'erspread, 
Within are naught but mortar, flint, and lead. 
Man is a torch borne in the wind ; a dream 
But of a shadow, summed with all his substance ; 
And, as great seamen, using all their wealth 
And skills in Neptune's deep, invisible paths, 
In tall ships richly built and ribbed with brass, 
To put a girdle round about the world, — 



CHAPMAN. 143 

When they have done it, coming near their haven, 

Are fain to give a warning-piece, and call 

A poor, stayed fisherman, that never passed 

His country's sight, to waft and guide them in ; — 

So, when we wander farthest through the waves 

Of glassy glory and the gulfs of state. 

Topped with all titles, spreading all our reaches, 

As if each private arm would sphere the earth, 

We must to virtue for her guide resort, 

Or we shall shipwreck in our safest port." 

JOHN. 

I can hardly persuade myself that the grand met- 
aphor of the torch did not come from Hebrew lips. 
I know no other image that would so well express 
the fickleness and uncertainty of our hold on life 
as this. The likening of virtue, too, to the poor, 
stayed fisherman that had never been out of his 
country^s sight, is very sweet. With the first part 
of the passage you read I was rather disappointed. 
But the last made up for all. 

PHILIP. 

I read it that the contrast might be the greater, 
and also to give you a specimen of his language. 
He does not, you see, pick his words much. He 
was in haste to get to the last half of the soliloquy, 
where he had something to say that pleased him 
better. You will find that he himself resembles 
those '* unskilful statuaries'' not a little some- 
times. The length, and intricacy even, of the last 
comparison in what I read pleases me, perhaps 



144 



SECOND CONVERSATION. 



from its putting me in mind so much of the golden- 
mouthed Jeremy Taylor. But Taylor always begins 
his similes with a " so have I seen," which gives 
great liveliness and force to them. 

JOHN. 

Do you remember one? 

PHILIP. 

Many ; who that had ever read one could forget 
it? — 

*^ For so have I seen a lark, rising from his bed of grass 
and soaring upward, singing as he rises, and hopes to get 
to heaven, and climb above the clouds ; but the poor bird 
was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, 
and his motion made irregular and unconstant, descending 
more at every breadth of the tempest than he could recover 
by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings ; till 
the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and 
stay till the storm was over, and did rise and sing as if 
he had learned 7nusic and ^notion of an angel as he passed 
so7netii7ies through the air about his ministries here below : 
so are the prayers of a good man," etc. — ''•Twenty-five 
Sermons preached at Golden Grove," Serm. V., p. 60. 
Edit. 1653. 

JOHN. 

What a poefs eye and heart and tongue! How 
lovingly he speaks of the ''poor bird^'' and the 
''little creature,'''^ and what a soaring melody there 
is in the ending! Shelley's " wSkylark," almost 
perfect as it is, has not the fluttering rise and the 



CHAPMAN. 145 

ecstatic gush of this. No lark ever shook fresher 
dew from his wings. 

PHILIP. 

I will give you one more : 

*' But so have I seen the returning sea enter upon the 
strand, and the waters, rolling toward the shore, throw up 
little portions of the tide, and retire, as if nature meant to 
play, and not to change the abode of waters ; but still the 
floods crept by little steppings, and invaded more by his 
progressions than he lost by his retreat, and, having told 
the number of his steps, he possesses his new portion till 
the Angel calls him back, that he may leave his unfaithful 
dwelling of the sand: so is the pardon of our sins." — 
Serm. VIII., p. 97. 

I have quoted two of his comparisons t© please 
you ; let me quote one passage more to please my- 
self. 

*' No man knows, but he that loves his children, how 
many delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the 
pretty conversation of those dear pledges ; their childish- 
ness, their stammering, their little angers, their innocences, 
their imperfections, their necessities, are so many little ema- 
nations of joy and comfort to him that delights in their per- 
sons and society." — Serm. XVIII. , p. 236. 

How I love that dingy old folio, with its huge 
lumps of Greek and Latin, its quaintnesses, its 
metaphysical refinements, its tender sympathies, 
and, above all, its radiant piety, and the poetry 
which springs out of it, goldening the whole ! I 
never can help looking upon Taylor as the last of 



146 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

that noble line of poets who consecrated the first 
half of the seventeenth century. 

Chapman loves to draw his heroes of a defiant 
and indomitable spirit, and with a thorough contempt 
of all fooleries and shams. I suspect that he has 
unconsciously given us a glimpse of his own nature. 
In his translation of the <* Iliad," he is said to show a 
great partiality to the rough, straightforward Ajax, 
and to eke out his speeches, here and there, with 
a little added fire of his own. Of this spirit here 
is a specimen. The king's brother, who wishes to 
gain over to his own interest so brave a man as 
D'Ambois, finds him lying on the ground, and says 
to him : 

'^ Turned to earth, alive ? 

Up, man ! the sun shines on thee. 
''^ D"* Avihois. Let it shine ; 

I am no mote to play in 't, as great men are. " 

So, when D'Ambois is killed, he says proudly 
that 

*' Death and Destiny 
Co?7ie behind D'' Ambois, ' ' 

as if even they feared to face him. But you will see 
enough of this in all the passages I shall read to you. 
No man ever had a larger or nobler idea of the might 
and grandeur of the human soul than Chapman. He 
had a great deal of that exulting feeling of strength 
and self-help which contemporaries endeavor to para- 
lyze by calling it conceit, but which the heart of 
posterity swells over as the instinct and stamp of 



CHAPMAN. 



H7 



greatness. It is a something which we find in the 
lives of all great men ; a recollection, as it were, of 
wings, which enables them, in the words of Marvell, 

** Remembering still their former height," 

to rise above these lower regions of turmoil into a 
clearer and serener air. It is a feeling of trustfulness 
which is needful to those who dare to cast their seed 
upon these waves of time that it may float down and 
come to fruitage in eternity, and who gladly put by 
the harlot blandishments of to-day (so bewitching to 
small souls), and find their strength and solace in 
the approving and prophetic eyes of that infinite to- 
morrow on whose great heart they rest secure, 

'' Feeling, through all this fleshly dress, 
Bright shoots of everlastingness." ^ 

JOHN. 

Yes, such feelings are the ravens which God sends 
to feed these prophets in the wilderness of an un- 
recognizing world ; they may seem but unsightly, 
ill-boding birds to everybody else, but to those whom 
they sustain they appear gentle as doves. God's 
messengers always look like shabby fellows to the 
rest of the world, and often are not recognized, even 
by those of whom they ask hospitality, till they are 
gone forever. Entering they seem simple wayfarers ; 
it is only when they look back upon us that we know 
the angel countenance with a pang of unavailing 
sorrow. 

1 Vaughan. 



148 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

PHILIP. 

Chapman seems never so well content as when 
he makes one of his heroes burst forth in an im- 
petuous (and sometimes muddy) flood of scornful 
independence, asserting proudly the dignity of genius 
as overtopping all other dignities whatever. He 
was, like all his great brethren (the worthy fore- 
runners of the glorious band who set the divine right 
of all temporal power forever beneath the feet of that 
diviner right of the eternal soul), ashamed to bend 
the knee, nay, even to pay common civility to any 
conventionality, howsoever seemingly venerable and 
august. Indeed, there is too much scorn and 
pride in him to consist with the highest genius. For 
great genius is humble ; its confidence is not in its 
own strength, but in that of its cause. Pride cannot 
fly over the great void gulf between its performance 
and its hope ; but if she tempt the perilous voyage, 
flutters her vain wings and drops exhausted into that 
unfathomable grave. Chapman's independent bear- 
ing often breaks down into a mere swagger, and, in- 
deed, is seldom confined within the limits of estab- 
lished propriety. Doubtless he was of opinion with 
Fuller that *' it is better to lap one^s pottage like a 
dog than to eat mannerly with a spoon of the DeviPs 
giving ; " and if he be sometimes bent on believing 
that all spoons, save a clumsy horn one of his own 
make, are presents from that liberal gentleman and 
go about laboriously to lap like a dog when he had 
better have eaten like a Christian (like some who 



CHAPMAN, 149 

foolishly think a certain rude ungraciousness of bear- 
ing best befitting a radical) , yet we should pardon a 
great deal to a mistaken love of principle, when the 
principle is a good one, remembering that the flanks 
of our own hobbies are bloody with our too fiery 
spurring, and that enthusiasm is the most amiable 
of excesses. 

JOHN. 

A long sentence, but safely delivered at last. 
Those radicals you speak of are the deep-seeing phi- 
losophers who believe that an innate democracy resides 
in cowhide boots, and that a thorough knowledge of 
government and a general intelligence upon all sub- 
jects soak into the brain from the liberal virtue of a 
roofless hat ; who suspect good breeding for a mon- 
archist in disguise ; believe that all white men are 
their brothers on the day before election ; and 
proudly stand sponsors while Mr. Dorr (a man who 
mistakenly, it is true, but no less surely, would have 
stabbed true democracy to the heart by appealing to 
brute force) is christened over again with the 
abused name of Algernon Sydney. And yet such 
men as these play off the puppet show of our gov- 
ernment ; such men as these persuade the working- 
men of our dear New England to rivet the chains 
upon three millions of their fellow-workers and so 
drug their senses with idle flatteries as to make them 
forget that while the laborer is bought and sold in 
one part of the country he can never be truly re- 
spected in the other. I can hardly keep my tears 
down when I think of it. 



150 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

PHILIP. 

Who goes mad now? But I do not wonder. I 
said that Chapman has little dramatic power. His 
plays seem rather to be soliloquies spoken by him- 
self from behind the mask of different characters 
than true dramas. Yet he has considerable knowl- 
edge of character, and shrewd remarks and little 
natural touches are not infrequent in his plays. 
Here is an instance of the last. Tamyra, who is 
secretly in love with D'Ambois, after a speech of his 
says, — fearful lest her calling him by name might 
betray her secret, and yet unable to let slip a chance 
of saying something in his praise, — 

** Methinks the ma7i hath answered for us well." 

The king's brother, who suspects the truth, turns 
to her and asks, 

'' The man? Why, Madam, d' ye not know his name ? " 

She answers nobly enough, 

" Man is a name of honor for a king ; 

Additions take away fl'om each chief thing,'''' 

JOHN. 

Yes, she covers her retreat with a true woman's 
skill, not allowing that she knows D'Ambois, and yet 
satisfying her love by construing the epithet she had 
applied to him into so jealous a tribute of praise as 
would be content with no place lower than the 
highest. 



CHAPMAN, I 5 I 

PHILIP. 

Something of Beaumont and Fletcher's comes to 
my mind in illustration : 

'^ I watched how fearfully, 
And yet how suddenly, he cured his lies ; 
The right wit of a woman." 

I shall now go on reading extracts from the rest 
of this play and from others, without following the 
plot or any other order than chance or fancy may 
dictate. Indeed, Chapman's plots are of little im- 
portance to him except as threads for his thoughts to 
crystallize around. Here are one or two specimens 
of his exalted notion of greatness and of the noble 
vigor and stateliness which animate and expand his 
verse in the expression of it : 

'' His words and looks 
Are like the flashes and the bolts of Jove ; 
His deeds inimitable^ like the sea 
Which shuts still as it opes, and leaves no tracks 
Nor prints of precedent for mean men^s acts.'''' 

D'' Amhois, 

JOHN. 

Grand, and grandly spoken. 

PHILIP. 

The following is even finer, or at least shows more 
art in expression : 

*•• His great heart will not down : 't is like the sea, 
That, partly by his own internal heat. 
Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion, 



152 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

Their heat and light, and partly by the place 

O' th' divers frames, but chiefly by the moon, 

Bristled with surges, — never vs^ill be won 

(No, not when the hearts of all those powers are burst) 

To make retreat into his settled home. 

Till he be crowned with his own quiet foam J^"* 

D^Ambois. 

JOHN. 

If a poet is fond of the sea, it always prepossesses 
me in his favor. The third verse of what you have 
read has great delicacy and beauty of expression : 

*' Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion: " 

there is a waviness in its flow, and, at the same 
time, a gliding melody, which suggests both the stars 
and the ocean. The ending is exquisite ; the whole 
sentence seems to swell on and on, like a wave upon 
the beach , till it breaks into the quiet foam of the 
last verse, and slides gently to its rippling close. 

PHILIP. 

Chapman does not often linger to describe out- 
ward nature ; he has more important matters at 
heart. His natural scenery is of the soul, and that 
mostly of an Alpine character. There is none of 
that breezy, summer-like feeling in him which per- 
vaded the verses of the lyric poets a short time after, 
and has come near to perfection in many descrip- 
tive pieces of our own day, 

''Annihilating all that 's made, 
To a green thought in a green shade," 



CHAPMAN, 153 

and seeming to be translations from the grasshopper, 
butterfly, locust, bird, and bee languages into the 
vernacular. Yet he has some passages of great 
merit in this kind, and which show a very genial 
eye and ear. 

JOHN. 

Whose is that couplet you just quoted ? 

PHILIP. 

Andrew MarvelPs, the generous friend of Milton, 
the kind-hearted satirist, the brave lover and de- 
fender of freedom, whose commendatory verses, you 
remember, are prefixed to *' Paradise Lost." He 
had a rare vein of poetry in him, delicate, yet vig- 
orously healthy. I know no poet who had a greater 
love of nature, or has poured it forth more sweetly. 
There is a description of grass by him, in a poem 
addressed to Lord Fairfax, which is full of the ripest 
fancy and feeling : 

' ' And now to the abyss I pass 
Of that unfathomable grass, 
Where men like grasshoppers appear, 
But grasshoppers are giants there ; 
They in their squeaking laugh, contemn 
Us, as we walk more low than them, 
And from the precipices tall 
Of the green spires io us do call. 
To see men through this meadow dive, 
We wonder how they rise alive ; 
• ••••• 

But, as the mariners who sound. 
And show upon their lead the ground. 



154 SECoyn conversation^. 

They bring up flowers, so to be seen 
And prove they ^ve at the bottom been. 
No scene that turns with engines strange 
Doth oftener than these meadows change ; 
For, when the sun the grass hath vext, 
The tawny mowers enter next. 
Who seem like Israelites to be. 
Walking on foot through a green sea : 
To them the grassy deeps divide 
And crowd, a lane on either side ; 
With whistlifig scythe , and elbow strong, 
These massacre the grass along." 

We cannot pardon extravagance in the imagi- 
nation : but Fancy would be tame without it, and 
can never assume her proper nature of joyousness, 
except she break into it. I know you will thank me 
if I read a little more. 

*'Thus I, easy philosopher, 
Among the birds and trees confer ; 
And little now to make me wants 
Or of the fowls, or of the plants ; 
Give me but wings as they, and I 
Straight floating on the air shall fly ; 
Or turn me but, and you shall see 
I was but an inverted tree. 
Already I begin to call 
In their most learned original ; 
And, where I language want, my signs 
The bird upon the bough divines, 
And more attentive there doth sit, 
Than if she were with lime-twigs knit. 
No leaf doth tremble in the wind. 



CHAPMAN, 155 

Which I, returning, cannot find; 
Out of these scattered SybWs-leaves^ 
Strange prophecies my fancy weaves ; 

• ••••• 

What Ronie^ Greece, Palestine, e^er said, 
I in this light mosaic read. 

• • • • • 

The oak-leaves me embroider all, 

Between which caterpillars crawl, 

And ivy, with fai7iiliar trails, 

Me licks and clasps, and curls and hales. 

Under this Attic cope, I move 

Like some great prelate of the grove ; 

Then, languishing with ease, I toss 

On pallets swollen of velvet moss. 

While the wind, cooling through the boughs, 

Flatters with air my panting brows. 

• •••■• 

How safe, methinks, and strong, behi^id 
These trees, I have encamped my mind ; 
Where beauty, aiming at the heart, 
Bends in some tree its useless dart ; 
And where the world no certain shot 
Can make, or me it toucheth not ! " 

Old Walton would have clapped his hands at this 
next : 

*'No serpent new, nor crocodile. 
Remains behind our little Nile, 
Unless itself you will 7?iistake, 
Among these meads the only snake. 
See in what wanton, harinless folds 
It everywhere the meadow holds ; 



156 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

And its yet muddy back doth lick. 

Till as a crystal mirror slick, , 

Where all things gaze themselves, a^id doubt 

If they be in it or without ; 

And, for his shade which therein shines. 

Narcissus-like, the sun, too, pines. 

O, what a pleasure 't is to hedge 

My temples here with heavy sedge, 

Abandoniiig my lazy side^ 

Stretched as a bank u7ito the tide ; 

Or to suspend my sliding foot 

On the osier's uridetermined root, 

And in its branches tough to hang, 

While at my lines the fishes twang ! " 

Thomson^ s Alarvell, Vol. III., p. 217. 

Now take one little turn with me in his '' Garden," 
and we will come back to Chapman. 

'^ Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, 
And Innocence, thy sister dear ? 
Mistaken long, I sought you then 
In busy companies of men. 
Your sacred plants, if here below, 
Only among the plants will grow ; 
Society is all but rude 
To this delicious solitude. 

• • • • • 

*^ What wondrous life is this I lead ! 
Ripe apples drop about my head ; 
The luscious clusters of the vine 
Upon my mouth do crush their wine ; 
The nectarine and curious peach 
Into my hands themselves do reach ; 



CHAPMAN, 157 

Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. 

** Meanwhile, the mind, from pleasure less, 
Withdraws into its happiness ; 
The mind, that ocean where each kind 
Doth straight its own resemblance find ; 
Yet it creates^ transcending these, 
Far other worlds and other seas. 
Annihilating all that V made 
To a green thought in a green shade, 

*^ Here, at the fountain's sliding foot. 
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root. 
Casting the body^s vest aside, 
My soul into the boughs doth glide ; 
There, like a bird, it sits and sings. 
Then whets and claps its silver wings ^ 
And, till prepared for longer /light. 
Waves in its plumes the various light, 

• * • • • 

'^ How well the skilful gardener drew, 
Of flowers and herbs, this dial new ! 
Where, from above, the milder sun 
Doth through a fragrant zodiac run ; 
And, as it works, the industrious bee 
Co7nputes its time as well as we. 
How could such sweet and zvholesome hours 
Be reckoned but with herbs and flozvers ? ' ' 

Thomson^ s Marvell, Vol, IH., p. 412. 

JOHN. 

If Milton had written these, we should almost 
have set them above the ** Allegro" and *' Pense- 



158 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

roso." Cowley's ** Grasshopper,'' and Emerson's 
** Humblebee," must yield to their luxuriant fancy, 
their delicate philosophy, and their fresh aptness 
of expression. They make a summer all around us 
in this bare December weather ; the roses bloom and 
the blossoms open their startled e3^es upon the bleak 
twigs as in Cornelius Agrippa's opus niagmmi of 
necromancy. And then how coolly and silently and 
fragrantly sweet images and calming thoughts drop 
wavering down, one after another, upon the heart, 
like a snow of blossoms from an overladen bough, 
making us feel better, and, if gentleness be wise, 
wiser too ! — I have no doubt that these verses were 
written in winter. The imagination is more select 
than the eye, and we describe things best when they 
are absent. The eye is puzzled and confounded 
with the presence of a beautiful object, and is walling 
to relapse from an analyzing attention into a vague 
delight. After the object is withdrawn, the imagi- 
nation does not recreate, but chooses and arranges 
from the distinctest images of the memory ; and this 
result, presented again to the eye, is more clear and 
satisfying than the original vision. 

PHILIP. 

I am afraid that Chapman's landscapes will look 
tame and leaden to you, now that your eye has been 
put out of tune by such brilliant colors. The follow- 
ing verses make one feel as if he had suddenly thrown 
up the window of a close and dazzling room, and 
gazed out into the dim, foreboding eyes of Night. 



CHAPMAN, 



159 



Tamyra is expecting D'Ambois, whom she loves 
unlawfully, at midnight. 

** Now all ye peaceful regents of the night, 
Silently-glidiitg exhalations. 

Languishing winds, and murmuring falls of waters. 
Sadness of heart, and ominous secureness. 
Enchantments, dead sleeps, all the friends of rest. 
That ever wrought upon the life of man, 
Extend your utmost strengths, and this charmed hour 
Fix like the centre ; make the violent wheels 
Of Time and Fortune stand ; and great existence 
(The Maker's treasury) now not seem to be 
To all but my approaching friends and me." 

You cannot fail to be struck with the sadness and 
silence infused into the first five verses by that peculiar 
property of the letter s which we were speaking of. 

JOHN. 

It seems to me the perfection of descriptive 
poetry ; painting, not the objects themselves, but their 
effect upon the mind reflected back upon them and 
giving them a color of its own. An unhappy man, 
if he go into a wood, shall hear nothing but sad 
sounds there ; the tinkle of the brook, the low ocean- 
murmur of the cloudy pines, the soft clatter of the 
leaves, shall all sound funereal to him ; he shall see 
only the dead limbs upon the trees, and only the in- 
hospitable corners of the rocks, too churlish even for 
the hardy lichen to pitch his tents upon. For out- 
ward nature is but one of the soul's retainers, and 
dons a festal or a mourning garment according as its 



l6o SECOND CONVERSATION, 

master does. There is nothing sad or joyful in 
nature, of itself. Autumn is often called a melan- 
choly season ; I cannot find it so, though I have 
often known the summer landscape to seem barer and 
bleaker than the long gray beach at Nantasket. 
No ; there hangs the wondrous lyre within our reach, 
its dumb chords bearing the unborn music in their 
womb, which our touch delivers, — a love-ditty or a 
dirge. I have no patience with nine-tenths of the 
descriptive verses I read. It is mere cataloguing, 
the conciseness and propriety of which an auctioneer 
might admire, and to him I gladly relinquish it. If 
I wish for an account of our flowers, the text-books 
of Professor Bigelow or Gray will amply suffice me ; 
if of our trees, I will be content with Michaux, one of 
whose volumes I have often found interesting enough 
to read it through at a single sitting. 

PHILIP. 

You must make an exception in favor of what the 
mere fancy, in one of her indifferent moods, colors 
to her will. The imagination has no neutralities ; it 
takes either one side or the other, as if by a will of 
its own, and brings all its resources to the support of 
it. Here is something of Fancy's when she was at 
her happiest : 

*' Like a calm 
Before a tempest, when the silent air 
Lays her soft ear close to the earth, to hearken 
For what she fears steals on to ravish her." 

D^Ambois, 



CHAPMAN, l6l 

This, too, has a sweet airiness about it : 

*' As, when the ?7toon hath comforted the night 
And set the world in silver of her light, 
The planets, asterisms, and whole state of heaven 
In beams of gold descending ; all the winds 
Bound up in caves, charged not to drive abroad 
Their cloudy heads; an universal peace, 
Proclaimed in silence of the quiet earth." 

Byron's Conspiracy.^ 

The following is fine in another way : 

*' Your Majesty hath missed a noble sight: 
The Duke Byron, on his brave beast Pastrana ; 
Who sits him like a full-sailed argosy 
Danced with a lofty billow, and as snug 
Plies to his bearer, both their motions mixed." 

Byron's Conspiracy, 

Chapman excels in metaphors and similes, and as 
most of them illustrate his descriptive faculty, I will 
read a few of them . 

** We must use these lures when we hawk for friends, 
And wind about them like a subtle river, 
That, seeming only to run on his course. 
Doth search still as he runs, and still finds out 
The easiest parts of entry on the shore, 

1 For this and all my other extracts from Chapman's "By- 
ron's Conspiracy," and " The Tragedy of the Duke de Byron," 
I am indebted to the copious and judicious extracts from those 
plays in the " Retrospective Review," Vol. IV., they never 
having been separately reprinted, and therefore being inacces- 
sible, in this country, in their entire form. 



l62 SECOND CONVERSATIOiV. 

Gliding so slyly by, as scarce he touched, 
Yet still eats something in it." 

Byron^ s Conspiracy, 

This is still better : 

*' And this wind, that doth sing so in your ears, 
I know is no disease bred in yourself, 
But whispered in by others, who, in swelling 
Your veins with empty hopes of much, yet able 
To perform nothing, are like shallow streams. 
That make themselves so many heavens to sight, 
Since you may see in them the moon and stars, 
The blue space of the air, as far from us. 
To our weak senses, in those shallow streams. 
As if they were as deep as heaven is high ; 
Yet, with your middle finger only sound them, 
And you shall pierce them to the very earth." 

Byron^s Conspiracy, 
The next is worthy of Shakspeare : 

'* As you may see a mighty promontory 

More digged and under-eaten than may warrant 
A safe supportance to his hanging brows, 
All passengers avoid him, shun all ground 
That lies within his shadow, and bear still 
A fiying eye upon him ; — so great men. 
Corrupted in their grounds, and building out 
Two swelling fronts for their foundations. 
When most they should be propped, are most for- 
saken, 
And men will rather thrust into the storms 
Of better-grounded states, than take a shelter 
Beneath their ruinous and fearful weight ; 



CHAPMAN. 163 

Yet they so oversee their faulty bases ^ 
That they remain securer in conceit^ 
And that security doth worse presage 
Their near destruction^ than their eaten grounds. ^^ 

Byron^s Conspiracy. 

The following verses, expressing Byron's conduct 
when first imprisoned, are very graphic in ide^, 
and have a vast deal of life in the expression. 
Notice what a hurry and flutter there is in the 
metre ; it jerks impatiently to and fro, as the bird 
would. 

'' As a bird, 
Entered a closet, which unwares is made 
His desperate prison, being pursued, amazed 
And wrathful, beats his breast from wall to wall, 
Assaults the light, strikes down himself, not out, 
And, being taken, struggles, gasps, and bites. 
Takes all his taker's strokings to be strokes, 
Abhorreth food, and, with a savage will. 
Frets, pines, and dies, for former liberty." 

Byron'^s Tragedy, 

Chaucer has two passages of which this reminds 
me, and, as they are very graphic, and I did not 
read them to you yesterday, I will quote them now. 

^'Men, by their nature, love newfangleness 
As do the birds that men in cages feed ; 
For, though thou night and day of them take heed. 
And strew their cages soft and fair as silk, 
And give them sugar, honey, bread, and milk, 
Yet, just so soon as e'er the door is up, 



164 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

They with their glad feet will spurn down their cup, 
And to the woods straightway on worms to feed." 

The Squire^s Tale, 

"Take any bird, and put it in a cage, 
And, though thou hast the forethought of a mage 
To foster it tenderly with meat and drink, 
^\nd every dainty that thou canst bethink, 
And keep it, too, as cleanly as thou may ; 
Although the cage with gold be never so gay, 
Yet had the bird by twenty thousand fold 
Be rather in a forest wild and cold. 
To feed on worms and such like wretchedness." 

The Manciple's Tale, 

JOHN. 

I love these homely comparisons drawn from the 
humble tragedies of every-day life. A poet who 
shoots all his arrows at the stars may chance to hit 
us now and then, but it is only by good luck. The 
heart, which is not so nice in its phrase as the 
intellect, is more likely to be reached by a humbler 
aim. I never shall forget the blind despair of a 
poor little humming-bird which flew through the 
open window of the nursery where I was playing 
when a child. I knew him at once for the same 
gay-vested messenger from Fairy Land whom I 
had often watched disputing with the elvish bees 
the treasures of the honeysuckle by the door-step. 
His imprisoned agony scarce equalled my own ; and 
the slender streaks of blood, which his innocent, 
frenzied suicide left upon the ceiling, were more 



CHAPMAN. 165 

terrible to me than the red witness which Rizzio 
left on the stair at Holyrood to cry out against his 
murderers. 

PHILIP. 

In the poem of ** Hero and Leander," begun by 
Marlow, and finished by Chapman, our poet's 
lighter qualities are very attractively displayed. 
There (as how could it be otherwise in such a 
subject ? ) he shows more Invention and graceful- 
ness of fancy than anywhere else ; there, as he him- 
self says of Marlow, he stands 

'^ Up to the chin in the Pierian flood." 

You remember Burns's admirable simile, 

^' Like snow-flakes falling on a river, 
A moment white, then gone forever " ? 

Chapman had used it before him, and with the same 
application : 

" Joy graven in sense, like snow in water, wastes ; 
Without preserve of virtue, nothing lasts." 

Warton and the anonymous editor of 1821 would 
have Chapman's share in the poem commence 
later. But I cannot conceive how, with the direct 
and positive testimony of the style before them, 
they could doubt that he began with the third ** ses- 
tyad " of the poem. If this verse, — 

**But time and all-states-ordering ceremony," — 

cannot claim him for father, I will never more put 
faith in physiognomy. There is too strong a fam- 



1 66 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

ily likeness between this and many verses in his 
translations to let us doubt their being of the same 
parentage. For instance : 

'* The golden-rod-sustaining- Argus guide : " 

'*To horse-breed-varying Phrygia likewise send: " 

"The all-of-gold-made-laughterloving dame: " 

or, to proceed at once to extremities with the 
doubter, — 

*' On Ida's-top-on-top-to-heaven's-pole heaped: " 

all of which occur in his version of Homer's '* Hymn 
to Venus.'"' Or take these from the '' Hymn to 
Hermes " : 

'* The-that-morn-born-Cyllenius did attain: " 

*' His-born-to-bark-mouth at him, till, in the end: " 

"The more-than-ever-certain deities." 

Mario w had none of this taste for handcuffing 
words together, till they halt along, melancholy and 
irregular, like a coffle of slaves under the eaves of 
the Capitol. I must not leave you to think that 
the compound epithets in Chapman's translations 
are all like these. Most of them are extremely 
fresh and spirited, and the translations are, besides 
their other great merits, full of interest to the stu- 
dent of language. Generally his epithets are truly 
*' winged words," though his zeal sometimes leads 
him to tie on rather clumsily three or four additional 
pairs of pinions, which hang awkwardly about them, 
and prevent their moving their natural wings. 



CHAPMAN, 167 

Here is a beautiful passage, opening with a 
simile : 

'■'- And all the while the red sea of her blood 
Ebbed with Leander ; but nozo turned the flood ^ 
And all her fleet of spirits came szuelling in 
With crowd of sail, and did hot fight begin 
With those severe conceits she too much marked ; 
And here Leander's beauties were embarked. 
He came in swimming, painted all with joys 
Such as might sweeten hell ; his thought destroys 

, All her destroying thoughts ; she thought she felt 
His heart in hers ; , 

Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes, 
And she supposed she saw ift Neptuite^s skies 
How her star wandered, washed in smarting brine, 
For her love's sake, that with immortal wane 
Should be embathed, and swim in 7Jiore hearf s-ease 
Than there be zvaters in the Sestian seasy 

Hero and Leander, — Third Sestyad. 

JOHN. 

I cannot say when I have met with an image that 
so charmed me as this : 

*' She saw in Neptune's skies 
How her star wandered." 

The suggestion of the inverted heaven in the sea, 
and the making Leander, rosy as he was with health 
and youth and love, into a star, brings a truly 
Grecian delight with it. Ah, the poet's heart is an 
unlighted torch, which gives no help to his footsteps, 
till love has touched it with flame. 



l68 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

PHILIP. 

You must read the whole, poem. If there be a 
few blurs in it, it is yet one of the clearest and most 
perfect crystals in the language, an entire opal, 
beautiful without the lapidary's help ; but it will 
shine with true pureness only in 



a 



the nunnery 
Of a chaste breast and quiet mind,'^ 

like some of Donne's more private and esoteric 
poems. The same candle may light the soul to its 
chapel of devotion, or its bed of harlotry. Most 
of the dramatists of Chapman's time excel in draw- 
ing the characters of women. This, no doubt, was 
partly owing to the greater freedom of intercourse 
between the sexes, which that less conventional day 
allowed and encouraged. Now we have become 
deep-versed in forms and shallow in realities. We 
have grown so delicately decent that we must need 
apologize for nature, and make God himself more 
comnie il faut, 

JOHN. 

And yet our decency is indecent. Fashion, being 
the art of those who must purchase notice at some 
cheaper rate than that of being beautiful, loves to do 
rash and extravagant things. She must be forever 
new, or she becomes insipid. If to-day she have 
been courteous, she will be rude to-morrow ; if to- 
day thinks her over-refined, to-morrow will wonder 
at seeing her relapsed into a semi-savage state. A 



CHAPMAN, 169 

few years ago certain elaborate and amorphous 
structures might be seen moving about the streets, 
in the whole of which the only symptom of animated 
nature to be discerned was in the movable feet and 
ankles which conveyed them along. Now even that 
sign of vitality has vanished ; the amorphorus struct- 
ures move about as usual, but their motive principle 
is as mysterious as that of MaelzePs chess-player. 
My own theory is that a dwarf is concealed some- 
where within. They may be engines employed for 
economical purposes by the civic authorities, as their 
use has been conjectured by an ingenious foreigner, 
who observed our manners attentively, to be the col- 
lection of those particles of mud and dust which are 
fine enough to elude the birchen brooms of the 
police, whose duty it is to cleanse the streets. 
There is the more plausibility in this theory, as 
they are actually provided with a cloth train or 
skirt of various colors, which seems . very well 
adapted to this end. A city poet, remarkable for 
the boldness of his metaphorical imagery, has given 
them the name of *' women," though from so nice 
an analogy as hitherto to have eluded my keenest 
researches. 

PHILIP. 

It must have been the same who gave the title of 
* ' full-dress " to the half-dress worn now by females 
of the better sort at parties, the sole object of which 
seems to be to prove the wearer's claim to rank with 
the genus lactiferce. One-half of the human race, I 
see, is resolved to get rid of the most apparent token 



170 



SECOND CONVERSATION. 



of our great ancestors' fall, and is rapidly receding to 
a paradisaical simplicity of vesture. Already have 
the shoulders emerged from their superstitious en- 
thralment, and their bold example will no doubt be 
rapidly followed by equally spirited demonstrations 
from the rest of the body impolitic. For the sake of 
consistency we must suppose that train-oil will soon 
elbow the ices from the supper-table. But a truce 
to this cynical vein. It is, nevertheless, mournful 
that women, who stint not in large assemblies to 
show that to the eyes of strangers which the holy 
privacy of home is not deemed pure enough to look 
upon, would yet grow crimson with modest horror, 
through the whole vast extent of their uncovered 
superficies, if one but dared to call by its dear 
English name that which, in the loved one, is the 
type of all maidenhood and sweetest retirement, — in 
the wife, of all chastity and whitest thoughts, — and 
in the mother, of all that is most tender and boun- 
teous. On such a bosom, methinks, a rose would 
wither, and the snowy petals of a lily drop away in 
silent, sorrowful reproof. We have grown too polite 
for what is holiest, noblest, and kindest in the 
social relations of life ; but, alas ! to blush, to con- 
ceal, to lie, to envy, to sneer, to be illiberal, — 
these trench not on the bounds of any modesty, 
human or divine. Yes, our English, which for cen- 
turies has been the mother-tongue of honest frank- 
ness, and the chosen phrase of freedom, is become 
so slavish and emasculate that its glorious Bacons, 
Taylors, and Miltons would find their outspoken 



CHAPMAN, 1 7 1 

and erect natures inapt to walk in its fetters, golden, 
indeed, and of cunningest Paris workmanship, but 
whose galling the soul is not nice enough to dis- 
cern from that of baser metal. The wild singing 
brook has been civilized ; the graceful rudeness of 
its banks has been pared away to give place to 
smooth-clipped turf; the bright pebbles which would 
not let it pass without the tribute of some new music 
have been raked out ; and it has become a straight, 
sluggish canal. 

JOHN. 

Yes ; the language has certainly become more pol- 
ished, and necessarily so. What should you say to 
a naked Pict, in that famous contradictory costume 
of Sir Richard Blackmore's, in your drawing-room? 
(By the way, I wonder that no critic has discovered 
that the dress alluded to was made of /^?///V-hide.) 
Any writer muscular enough can bend the good old 
Ulysses'-bow of our language and make it hurl its 
shafts with as sharp a twang as ever. It is not our 
speech that has grown cowardly and time-serving, but 
we ourselves ; and we have bribed the language to 
turn traitor with us. Because we do not task it in 
that cause which is the holiest, because the humblest 
and weakest and most despised, of all that call Free- 
dom mother, does it therefore refuse its ancient 
privilege of thunder to the lips of Phillips, or Doug- 
lass, or Burleigh, or Abby Kelly? Let the mean 
apartments into which the church and the state have 
driven the apostles of that humanity which Christ 
preached and practised answer ! Let the unchartered 



172 



SECOND CONVERSATION. 



majesty of the blue heaven which has never forbid 
them the shelter of its soaring canopy, when the poor 
buildings of human hands have been scoffingly denied 
them, answer ! 

PHILIP. 

Nevertheless, you must allow that the language has 
lost much of its pristine lustiness by the taint of 
Gallicism which is more and more creeping over it. 
It has grown so polite and mincing, and in our brave 
old Saxon-sprung New England, too I The homely 
names of man and woman, which sought sanctuary 
in the cottage and the farm-house, from the luxury, 
effeminacy, and vice of city and court, must now be 
driven thence also, and our very dairy-maids and 
ploughmen must be ladies and gentlemen. We may 
speak of these things as unconcerned spectators ab 
extra^ being necessarily precluded from the privilege 
of one of these latter titks by virtue of our sex, and 
from the other by our Abolitionism. Perhaps we 
may ere long be taught to call our homes papa-land 
and mamma-country, leaving the uncouth names of 
father and mother to such as are ignorant or gross 
enough to be natural. Let us forget that we ever so 
far yielded to the demoralizing tendency of our baser 
natures as to have been suckled at our mother's 
breasts (if we can do so while the present fashion of 
feminine full-dress retain its sway), and do penance 
in white kid gloves and French boots for the dam- 
nable heresy of our childhood, when we entertained 
a theory, unfounded as the Ptolemaic system of as- 



CHAPMAN, 



^7?> 



tronomy, that straightforward truth was respectable, 
and that women had other developments besides 
head and arms, our uninspired eyesight to the con- 
trary notwithstanding ! 

JOHN. 

You are getting very merry and very parenthetical 
at the same time. Let the original topic of our con- 
versation now edge itself in, by way of parenthesis, 
and let me have a chance of judging for myself of the 
dignity of Chapman's ideas of woman. 

PHILIP. 

I heartily thank you for disentangling me so 
adroitly. Hear Chapman : 

'* Noble she is by birth made good by virtue ; 
Exceeding fair ; and her behaviour to it 
Is like a singular musician 
To a sweet instrument, or else as doctrine 
Is to the soul, that puts it into act, 
And prints it full of admirable forms, 
Without which 't were an empty, idle flame ; 
Her eminent judgment to dispose these parts 
Sits on her brow and holds a silver sceptre, 
Wherewith she keeps time to the several musics 
Placed in the sacre,d concert of her beauties : 
Love's complete armory is managed in her 
To stir affection, and the discipline 
To check and to affright it from attempting 
Any attaint might disproportion her, 
And make her graces less than circular : 
Yet her even carriage is as far from coyness, 
As from immodesty ; in play, in dancing, 



174 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

In suffering courtship, in requiting kindness, 
In use of places, hours, and companies. 
Free as the sun, and nothing more corrupted ; 
As circumspect as Cynthia in her vows, 
As constant as the centre to observe them ; 
Ruthful and bounteous, never fierce nor dull, 
In all her courses ever at the full." 

Monsieur Z)' Olive, 

I know what vour thoughts are now. You are 
thinking that there is but one to whom these silver- 
flowing lines may be applied. You think that it is 
like **the mantle made amiss *^ of the old romance, 
which made itself too short for one and too long for 
another, and yet fitted itself to the shape of the true 
maiden like a bridal garment. 

JOHX. 

Nay, you have shot wide. There can be but 
one in whom each of us can trace the likeness of 
this rare portrait : yet it would be doubting the good 
providence of God, to draw back our heads into the 
dull tortoise-shell of our selfish unbelief, and refuse 
to think that there are many such. It is only in 
love that the soul finds weather as summer-like as 
that of the clime whence it has been transplanted, 
and can put forth its blossoms and ripen its fruit 
without fear of nipping frosts. Never was falser 
doctrine preached than that love's chief delight and 
satisfaction lies in the pursuit of its object, which 
won, the charm is alreadv fluttering: its wino^s to 
seek some fairer height. This is true only when 



CHAPMAN, 



175 



love has been but one of the thousand vizards of sel- 
fishness, when we have loved ourselves in the beau- 
tiful spirit we have knelt to ; that is, when we have 
merely loved the delight we felt in loving. Then it 
is that the cup we so thirsted after tastes bitter or 
insipid, and we fling it down undrunk. Did we 
empty it, we should find that it was the poor, muddy 
dregs of self at the bottom, which made our gorge 
rise. If it be God whom we love in loving our 
elected one, then shall the bright halo of her spirit 
expand itself over all existence, till every human face 
we look upon shall share in its transfiguration, and 
the old forgotten traces of brotherhood be lit up by 
it ; and our love, instead of pining discomforted, 
shall be lured upward and upward by low, angelical 
voices, which recede before it forever, as it mounts 
from brightening summit to summit on the delec- 
table mountains of aspiration and resolve and deed. 

PHILIP. 

You are in the mood now to listen to some 
favorite passages of mine in one of Taylor's Ser- 
mons, in which is a sweet picture of the benign in- 
fluence of piety in a woman. The extract from 
Chapman which I last read always brings these into 
my mind. Let us open the grim-looking old folio 
once more ; there is as much true poetry between its 
shabby covers as may be found anywhere out of 
Shakspeare. 

^* I have seen a female religion that wholly dwelt upon 
the face and tongue; that, like a wanton and undressed 



176 SECOND CONVERSATION 

tree, spends all its juice in suckers and irregular branches, 
in leaves and gum, and, after all such goodly outsides, 
you shall never eat an apple, nor be delighted with the 
beauties nor the perfumes of a hopeful blossom. But the 
religion of this excellent lady was of another constitution. 
It took root downward in humility, and brought forth fruit 
upward in the substantial graces of a Christian; in charity 
and justice; in chastity and modesty; in fair friendships and 
sweetness of society. She had not very much of the forms 
and outsides of godliness, but she was hugely careful for the 
power of it, for the moral, essential, and useful parts, such 
which would make her be, not seem to be, religious. . . . 
In all her reUgion, and in all her actions of relation toward 
God, she had a strange evenness and untroubled passage, 
sliding toward her ocean of God and of infinity with a 
certain and silent motion. So have I seen a river, deep 
and smooth, passing with a still foot and a sober face, and 
paying to the fiscus^ the great exchequer, of the sea, the 
prince of all the watery bodies, a tribute large and full; 
and hard by it a little brook, skipping and making a noise 
upon its unequal and neighbor bottom, and, after all its 
talking and bragged motion, it paid to its common audit 
no more than the revenues of a little cloud or a confempti- 
ble vessel. So have I sometimes compared the issues of 
her religion to the solemnities and famed outsides of 
another's piety. It dwelt upon her spirit, and was incor- 
porated with the periodical work of every day. 
The other appendage of her rehgion, which also was a 
great ornament to all the parts of her life, was a rare modesty 
and humility of spirit, a confident undervaluing and despis- 
ing of herself. For, though she had the greatest judgment 
and the greatest experience of things and persons, that I 
ever yet knew in a person of her youth and sex and cir- 
cumstances, yet, as if she knew nothing of rt, she had the 



CHAPMAN, 177 

meanest opinion of herself, and, like a fair taper, when she 
shined to all the room, yet, round about her own station, 
she had cast a shadow and a cloud, and she shined to 
everybody but herself. . . . But so it was that the 
thought of death dwelt long with her, and grew, from the 
first steps of fancy and fear, to a consent, from thence, to 
a strange credulity and expectation of it; and, without the 
violence of sickness, she died, as if she had done it volun- 
tarily and by design, and for fear her expectation should 
have been deceived, or that she should seem to have had 
an unreasonable fear or apprehension, or rather (as one 
said of Cato) she died as if she were glad of the oppor- 
tunity." 

JOHN. 

Who was this sainted lady? Such a sermon were 
almost worth dying for. 

PHILIP. 

Frances, Countess of Carbery. A Latin epitaph 
is prefixed to the sermon, doubtless written by Taylor 
himself. The first part of it is quite graceful, but it 
soon becomes anything but Ciceronian. The great 
advantage of using Latin for such occasions is, that 
it 'operates in some measure as a check and curb 
upon the writer, and makes him more dignified in 
spite of himself; but when he breaks free of all 
restraint, as here, the dead language is more intoler- 
able than the living one. Perhaps another advantage 
of the Latin for this proverbially flattering kind of 
literature may be found in the fecundity of its super- 
latives, there being nothing in our own language that 
may claim comparison with its glib and liberal issi- 



178 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

muses. I do not know whether one little token of the 
care with which Taylor regulated the golden balance 
of his periods has ever been noticed. I mean his 
frequent elision of the letter e in the termination ed, 
to prevent the reader from accenting it. In this he 
is always guided by so delicate an ear as stands him 
in stead of metrical rules. 

JOHN. 

It is certainly worth remarking. By putting 
Taylor and Chapman together, we get such a picture 
as realizes Wordsworth's conception of a perfect 
woman, such a one as we can love, and feel that 
therein we are made in God's image ; such a one as 
makes love what it should be, venerable, reverend, 
not a thing to be lightly treated and put on and off 
like a glove. 

PHILIP. 

Spenser had a noble idea of love : 

'' For love is lord of truth and loyalty, 
Lifting himself out of the lowly dust, 
On golden plumes, up to the highest sky, 
Above the reach of loathly, sinful lust; 

• • • • • • 

Such is the power of that sweet passion, 

That it all sordid baseness doth expel. 

And the refined soul doth newly fashion, 

Unto a fairer form." 

Hymn of Love, 

Having made an extract from him whom Milton 
calls " our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I 



CHAPMAN, 



179 



dare to be known to think a better teacher than Sco- 
tus or Aquinas,'^ let me please myself still farther by 
hanging a sketch of his beside the others, with which 
it harmonizes fitly. He is speaking of a woman's 
mind : 

*^ There dwelt sweet love and constant chastity, 
Unspotted faith, and comely womanhood. 
Regard of honor, and mild modesty ; 
There virtue reigns as queen in loyal throne, 
And giveth laws alone, 
The which the base affections do obey, 
And yield their services unto her will ; 
Nor thought of thing uncomely ever may 
Thereto approach, to tempt her mind to ill." 

Ep ithala m ion . 

Now repeat to yourself what you remember of 
Tennyson's '* Isabel," and your mind will be as full 
of silent, silvery images as the heaven is of stars. 

JOHN. 

If women fulfilled fully their divine errand there 
would be no need of reforming societies. The 
memory of the eyes that hung over a man in infancy 
and childhood will haunt him through all his after 
life. If they were good and holy they will cheer and 
encourage him in every noble deed, and shame him 
out of every meanness and compromise. 

PHILIP. 

In spite of the side-thrusts which you sometimes 
make at my Abolitionism, I am persuaded that you 



l8o SECOND CONVERSATION, 

go as far as I do in that matter. I know your humor 
for appearing what you are not, in order, by opposi- 
tion, to draw out opinions upon the side which you 
really espouse. Such is your assumed liking for the 
artificial school of poetry. You are willing to assume 
any disguise in order to get into the enemy's camp, 
and, once there, like Alfred, you sing them a song 
that sends them all to their arms. A little while 
ago you spoke approvingly of Miss Kelly ; if I had 
done it, the Thersites-half of your nature would have 
been aroused at a breath. Do you really love to 
hear a woman speak in public? 

JOHN. 

Why not as well as in private, or at all? If any 
have aught worth hearing to say, let them say it, be 
they men or women. We have more than enough 
prating by those who have nothing to tell us. I 
never heard that the Quaker w^omen were the worse 
for preaching, or the men for listening to them. If 
we pardon such exhibitions as those of the dancing 
females on the stage, surely our prudery need not 
bristle in such a hedgehog fashion because a woman 
in the chaste garb of the Friends dares to plead in 
public for the downtrodden cause of justice and free- 
dom. Or perhaps it is more modest and maidenly 
for a woman to expose her body in public than her 
soul? If we listen and applaud, while, as Coleridge 
says, 

* 'Heaves the proud harlot her distended breast 
In intricacies of laborious song," 



CHAPMAN. I 8 1 

must we esteem it derogatory to our sense of refine- 
ment to drink from the fresh brook of a true woman's 
voice, as it gushes up from a heart throbbing only 
with tenderness for our neighbor fallen among 
thieves. Here in Massachusetts we burn Popish 
nunneries, but we maintain a whole system of Prot- 
estant ones. If a woman is to be an Amazon, all 
the cloisters in the world will not starve or compress 
her into a Cordelia. There is no sex in noble 
thoughts, and deeds agreeing with them ; and such 
recruits do equally good service in the army of truth, 
whether they are brought in by women or men. Out 
on our Janus-faced virtue, with its one front looking 
smilingly to the stage, and its other with shame-shut 
eyes turned frowningly upon the Anti-slavery Con- 
vention ! If other reapers be wanting, let women go 
forth into the harvest-field of God and bind the ripe 
shocks of grain ; the complexion of their souls shall 
not be tanned or weather-stained, for the sun that 
shines there only makes the fairer and whiter all that 
it looks upon. Whatever is in its place is in the 
highest place ; whatever is right is graceful, noble, 
expedient ; and the universal hiss of the world shall 
fall upon it as a benediction, and go up to the ear of 
God as the most moving prayer in its behalf. If a 
woman be truly chaste, that chastity shall surround 
her, in speaking to a public assembly, with a ring of 
protecting and rebuking light, and make the exposed 
rostrum as private as an oratory. If immodest, there 
is that in her which can turn the very house of God 
into a brothel. 



I 82 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

PHILIP. 

I shall not dispute the point with you. I love to 
hear the voices of women anywhere, but chiefly where 
truth is pleaded for ; they know a shorter way to the 
heart than those of men do. Chapman valued woman 
as highly as you do. Hear him : 

** Let no man value at a little price 
A virtuous women's counsel ; her winged spirit 
Is feathered oftentimes with heavenly words, 
And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure ; 
The weaker body, still the stronger soul. 



O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife, 

Discreet and loving ! Not one gift on earth 

Makes a man's life so nighly bound to heaven. 

She gives him double forces to endure 

And to enjoy, by being one with him. 

Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense ; 

And, like the twins Hippocrates reports, 

If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short ; 

If he lament, she melts herself in tears ; 

If he be glad, she triumphs; if he stir, 

She moves his way; . . . . • 

And is in alterations passing strange ; 

Himself divinely varied without change. 

Gold is right precious, but his price infects 

With pride and avarice ; authority lifts 

Hats fron^ men's heads, and bows the strongest knees. 

Yet cannot bend in rule the weakest hearts ; 

Music delights but one sense ; and choice meats ; 

One quickly fades ; the others stir to sin ; 



CHAPMAN, 183 

But a true wife both sense and soul delights, 
And niixeth not her good with any ill ; 
Her virtues, ruling hearts, all powers command ; 
All store without her leaves a man but poor. 
And with her poverty is exceeding store ; 
No time is tedious with her ; her true worth 
Makes a true husband think his arms enfold 
(With her alone) a complete world of gold.'* 

Gentleman Usher, 

Here is something very beautiful ; 

** Exceeding fair she was not, and yet fair 
In that she never studied to be fairer 
Than nature meant her ; beauty cost her nothing.''^ 

All Fools, 

Of Love he says : 

" Love is nature's second sun, 
Causing a spring of virtues where he shines ; 
And as, without the sun, the world's great eye, 
All colors, beauties, both of art and nature. 
Are given in vain to men ; so, without love. 
All beauties bred in women are in vain, 
All virtues born in man lie buried ; 
For love informs us as the sun doth colors : 
And, as the sun, reflecting his warm beams 
Against the earth, begets all fruits and flowers. 
So love, fair shining in the inward man. 
Brings forth i7t hi?n the honorable fruits - 
Of valor, wit, virtue, and haughty thoughts. 
Brave resolution, and divine discourse,''^ 

All Fools, 



184 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

JOHN. 

Yes ; and, wanting love, a man remains nailed 
to the dreadful cross of self without help or hope. 
I begin to feel that Chapman is truly a poet. A 
trickster, a man who loves the art for the applause 
it wins him, or runs about seeking for Apollo's 
arrows because they are of gold, concentrates all 
our admiration upon himself; a true poet makes 
us forget himself, makes life and the whole human 
race grow more noble in our eyes. It is only when 
the instruments are poor and meagre or out of tune, 
that we think of them, and are conscious of aught 
but the music they give birth to, or the divine 
emotions that rise, like Venus, rosy and dripping, 
from its golden waves. 

PHILIP. 

Chapman's poetry abounds in striking aphorisms, 
which often serve to clench and rivet the sense ; 
but he is so fond of them, that he welds them on 
sometimes as if at random, or even sticks them 
lightly to the text with a frail wafer. In them- 
selves, they are always full of earnest sense and 
philosophy. Here are a few examples ; 

'^Time's golden thigh 
Upholds the flowery body of the earth 
In sacred harmony, and every birth 
Of men and actions makes legitimate, 
Being used aright : the use of time is fate. ^^ 

Hero and Leander, 



CHAPMAN, 185 

'' Custom^ which the apoplexy is 

Of bed-rid nature, ' ' 

Ibid, 

'^ Who knows not 
Venus would seem as fair from any spot. 
Of light demeanor, as the very skin 
' Twixt Cynthia's brows ? Sin is ashamed of sin, ^"^ 

Ibid, 

^^ Ahy nothing doth the world with mischief fill ^ 

But want of feeling one another^ s ill,^^ 

Ibid, 

*' That which does good disgraceth no degree,'^'' 

Ibid, 



Before I shut **Hero and Leander," I will read 
you a few other passages, though in a wholly dif- 
ferent vein. They show him in his most graceful 
and amiable aspect. This is a pretty little rustic 
landscape : 

'* A country virgin, keeping of a vine, 
Who did of hollow bulrushes combine 
Snares for the stubble -loving grasshopper ; 
And by her lay her scrip that nourished her. 
Within a myrtle-shade she sat and sung, 
And tufts of wavering reeds about her sprung, 
Where lurked two foxes, that, while she applied 
Her trifling snares, their thieveries did divide, 
One to the vine, another to her scrip 
That she did negligently overslip ; 
By which her fruitful vine and wholesome fare 
She let be spoiled to make a childish snare." 



1 86 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

After an unpropitious sacrifice, 

'' Hero wept, but her affrighted eyes 
She quickly wrested from the sacrifice, 
SJuitthem, and inward for Leander looked^ 
Searched her soft bosom, and from thence she plucked 
His lovely picture ; which when she had viewed, 
Her beauties were with all love's joys renewed ; 
The odors sweetened^ a7td the fires bur^ied clear ; 
Leander'' s for 7)1 left no ill object there,''"' 

This is beautiful, and ends with a fine truth : 

*' Her chamber her cathedral-church should be, 
And her Leander her chief deity. 
For, in her love, these did the gods forego ; 
And, though her knowledge did not teach her so, 
Yet it did teach her this, that what her heart 
Did greatest hold . 

That she did make her god ; a7id V was less 7iaught 
To leave gods in professio7i a7td in thought 
Than i7i her love a7id life ; for therein lie 
Most of her duties and their dignity ; 
A7id^ rail the brainbald world at what it will. 
That 's the grand atheism that reig7is i7i it still! ^^ 

• 

These two similes are very fresh : 

** His most kind sister all his secrets knew, 
A7id to her, si7tgi7tg, like a shower hefiew : " 

'* Home to the mourning city they repair 

With news as wholesoTne as the 7nor7iing air J* 



CHAPMAN, 187 

I must unwillingly lay down the little volume, 
and come back to glean a few more aphoristic sen- 
tences. 

"As the light 
Not only serves to show, but render us 
Mutually profitable, so our lives, 
In acts exemplary, not only win 
Ourselves good names, but do to others give 
Matter for virtuous deeds, by which we live,^^ 

D^Ambois, 



" Who to himself is law no law doth need, 
Offends no law, and is a king indeed." 



" Each natural agent works but to this end, 
To render that it works on like itself." 



" He that observes but as a worldly man 
That which doth oft succeed, and by the events 
Values the worth of things, will think it true. 
That Nature works at random : . . . . 
But, with as much proportion, she may make 
A thing that from the feet up to the throat 
Hath all the wondrous fabric man should have. 
And leave it headless, for a perfect man ; 
As give a full man valor, virtue, learning, 
Without an end more excellent than those 
On whom she no such worthy parts bestows." 



Ibid, 



Ibid, 



Ibid, 



" Virtue is not malicious ; wrong done her 
Is righted ever when men grant they err." 

Mons, D' Olive. 



I 88 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

" He is at no end of his actions blest, 
Whose ends will make him greatest and not best." 

Byron's Tragedy. 

Here is a fine metaphor : 

* ' Thy impartial words 

Are like brave falcons, that dare truss a fowl 

Much greater than themselves." 

WAinbois. 

And this : 

" The chain-shot of thy lust is yet aloft, 

x\nd it must murder." 

D'Ambois, 

And this : 

" As night the hfe-incHning stars best shows, 
So lives obscure the starriest souls disclose." 

Epilogue to Translations, 

The passions he calls 

*' Those base foes that insult on weakness. 
And still fight housed behind the shield of nature." 

D^A?nbois„ 

There is something grand and mysterious in this 
invocation of a spirit : 

" Terror of darkness ! O thou king of flames, 
That with thy fnusic-foot ed hoxsQ dost strike 
The clear light out of crystal on dark earth. 
And hurl'st instructive fire about the world. 
Wake, wake the drowsy and enchanted night 
That sleeps with dead eyes in this heavy riddle ! 



CHAPMAN. 1 89 

thou great prince of shades where never sun 

Sticks his far-darted beams, whose eyes are made 

To shine in darkness and see ever best 

Where men are bhndest ! " 

Ibid, 

The vague terrors, of guilt are thus graphically set 
forth : 

" O my dear servant, in thy close embraces 

1 have set open all the doors of danger 
To my encompassed honor and my life ! 
Before, I was secure *gainst death and hell, 
But now am subject to the heartless fear 
Of every shadow and of every breath, 

And would change firmness with an aspen leaf; 

So confident a spotless conscience is, 

So weak a guilty." 

Ibid. 

Chapman's self-reliant nature is continually peep- 
ing forth from under every mask it puts on : 

" When men fly the natural clime of truth. 
And turn themselves loose out of all the bounds 
Of justice and the straight way to their ends, 
Forsaking all the sure force in themselves, 
To seek without them that which is not theirs, 
The forms of all their comforts are distracted. " 

Byron's Tragedy. 

He thus gives us his notion of what a man 
should be : 

" Give me a spirit that on life's rough sea 
Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind, 



190 



SECOND CONVERSATION, 



Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack, 
And his rapt ship run on her side so low. 
That she drinks water, and her keel plows air. 

There is no danger to a man who knows 

What life and death are ; there 'j not any law 
Exceeds his kiiowledge ; neither is it lawful 

That he should stoop to any other law : 

He goes before them and commands them all. 

Who to himself is a law rational,^"* 

Byron's Conspiracy. 

JOHN. 

Altogether noble ! The first few verses illustrate 
well the natural impetuosity which so much dis- 
tinguished Chapman's character, as I gather it from 
what you have read ; and the last six exhibit the 
philosophic gravity and wisdom to which habits of 
reflection and the life of a scholar had tempered it. 
He must have been one of those incongruities we 
sometimes meet with ; a man, calm and lofty in his 
theory, but vehement and fiery to excess in action, 
— whose very stillness, like the sleep of the top, 
seems the result of intense motion. 

PHILIP. 

The same indomitable spirit shows itself in all 
Chapman^s characters. Even their humility is a 
kind of repressed and concentrated pride. He 
makes the Duke de Byron say : 

**To fear a violent good abuseth goodness ; 
' T is immortality to die aspiring. 
As if a man were taken quick to heaven : 



CHAPMAN, 



191 



What will not hold perfection, let it burst : 

What force hath any cannon, not being charged. 

Or being not discharged ? To have stuff and form, 

And to lie idle, fearful, and unused, 

Nor form nor stuff shows. Happy Semele, 

That died, compressed with glory ! Happiness 

Denies comparison of less or more, 

And, not at most, is nothing, — Like the shaft, 

Shot at the sun by angry Hercules, 

And into shivers by the thunder broken. 

Will I be, if I burst ; and i7i my heart 

This shall be written : * Yet V zvas high and right ! ' " 

JOHN. 

Chapman's pride has at least all the grandeur in 
it that pride can ever have ; but, at best, pride and 
weakness are Siamese twins, knit together by an 
indissoluble hyphen. What a gloriously exulting 
comparison is that of the shaft of Hercules ! The 
metre also seems to my ear very full and majestic. 

PHILIP. 

Even his devils are still Chapman. The Evil 
Spirit says to D'Ambois : 

*' Why call'dst thou me to this accursed light 
For these light purposes ? / am emperor 
Of that inscrutable darkness where are hid 
All deepest truths and secrets never seen. 
All which I know, and command legions 
Of knowing spirits can do more than these. 
Any of this m,y guard that circle me 
In these blue fires, from out of whose di7n fumes 



192 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

Vast murmurs use to breaks and^ from these sou^zds. 
Articular voices^ can do ten parts iitore^ 
Than open such slight truths as you require."*"* 

I know nothing in Marlow's mighty line grander 
than this. Ford's description of hell, though strik- 
ing, seems too much like a bill of particulars (if I 
remember it rightly) and has a kind of ditto-ditto air, 
which looks quite ordinary beside the mysterious 
and half-hidden grandeur of these verses. This is 
such a picture as Fuseli would have painted. Here 
is something in a softer key : 

'* A man . . . that only would uphold 
Man in his native nobless, from whose fall 
All our dissensions rise ; that in himself 
(Without these outzvard badges of our frailty ^ 
Riches and honor') knows he comprehends 
Worth with the greatest : kings had never borne 
Such boundless empire over other men, 
Had all maintained the spirit and state of D'Ambois ; 
Nor had the full, impartial hand of Nature, 
That all things gave in their original, 
Without these definite terms of mine and thine, 
Been turned unjustly to the hand of Fortune, 
Had all preserved her in her prime like D'Ambois. 
No envy, no disjunction, had dissolved 
Or plucked one stick out of the golden fagot 
In which the world of Saturn bound our lives ^ 
Had all been held together by the nerves, 
The genius, and the ingenious soul of D'Ambois." 

You have by this time got a very good idea of 
Chapman's more prominent and worthy character- 



CHAPMAN, 



193 



istics. His comedies show him to have been not 
altogether devoid of humor, though he does not pos- 
sess the faculty in that exuberance without which it 
has too much apparent machination to be interesting. 
** Monsieur D^Olive " is an amusing character, but 
his fun is chiefly traditional. There is one interest- 
ing point in Chapman's comedies, and that is, a trace, 
discernible here and there, of his admiration for 
Shakspeare, showing itself in a word or turn of ex- 
pression suggested by him. There are several 
examples in his tragedies, too, some of which are 
remarkable. I confess I love Chapman the better 
for it. I must give you one more example of his 
fine poetic instinct. Just before a ghost appears to 
D'Ambois, he says : 

''What violent heat is this ? Methinks the fire 
Of twenty lives doth, on a sudden, fiash 
Through all 7ny faculties : the air goes high 
In this dose chamber, a7id the frighted earth 
Trembles and shrinks beneath me,''"' 

This is excellent. It would be unfair not to 
show you the enthusiastic love which Chapman felt 
for our native language, hallowed as it has been by 
the use of the noblest poets that ever dignified the 
earth. In his address to the reader, prefatory to his 
translation of the *' Iliad," he says : 

''And, for our tongue, that still is so i7iipaired 
By travelliftg linguists^ I can prove it clear 
That no tongue hath the Muse^s utterance heired — 
For verse, and that sweet music to the ear. 



194 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

Struck out of rhyme — so naturally as this ; 

Our monosyllables so kindly fall, 

And meet ^ opposed in rhyme ^ as they did kiss, ^^ 

So in his *' Hymnus in Cynthiam " : 



(( 



Sweet Poesy 
Will not be clad in her supremacy 
With these strange garments (Rome's hexameters) 
As she is English ; but in right prefers 
Our native robes, put on with skilful hands.' 



>> 



Chapman's vigor of thought and expression may 
be seen in every page of his writmg. Here is a frag- 
ment of his prose ; he is speaking of critics : 

'^ How, then, may a man stay his marvelling to see 
passion-driven men, reading but to curtail a tedious hour, 
and altogether hidebound with affection to great men''s fan- 
cies, take upon them as killing censures as if they were judg- 
menfs butchers, or as if the life of truth lay tottering in 
their verdicts ? 

'' Now what a supererogation in wit this is, to think skill 
so mightily pierced with their loves that she should prosti- 
tutely show them her secrets, when she will scarcely be 
looked upon by others but with invocation, fasting, watch- 
ing, yea, not without having drops of their souls, like a 
heavenly familiar / " — Dedicatory Epistle to his '* Original 
Hymns." 

JOHN. 

This has a taste of Milton in it. That metaphor 
of the heavenly familiar is exceedingly beautiful. It 
is no wonder that men wrote well who looked upon 
their art with such religion. 



CHAPMAN. 195 

PHILIP. 

It reminds me rather of Samuel DaniePs * * Defense 
of Rime," one of the noblest pieces of prose in the 
language, dignified, eloquent, enthusiastic, and full 
of rich thoughts, richly clad in the singing-robes of 
choicest speech. Now let us see how such a man as 
Chapman would die. 

" Let me alone in peace ; 
Leave my soul to me whom it most concerns ; 
You have no charge of her ; I feel her free : 
How she doth rouse ^ and, like a falcon, stretch 
Her silver wings, as threatening Death with deaths 
At whom I joyfully will cast her off ! 
I know this body but a sink of folly ; 
The groundwork and raised frame of woe and frailty ; 
The bond and bundle of corruption ; 
A quick corpse, only sensible of grief ; 
A walking sepulchre ; . . . 
A glass of air, broken with less than breath ; 
A slave bound face to face with Death, till death : 
And what said all you more ? I know, besides, 
That life is but a dark and stormy night 
Of senseless dreams, terrors, and broken sleeps ; 
A tyranny devising but to plague, 
And make man long in dying, rack his death, — 
And death is nothing : what can you say more ? 
/, being , , , a little earth, 
Am seated, like earth, betwixt both the heavens, 
That, if I rise, to heaven I rise ; if fall, 
I likewise fall to heaven : what stronger faith 
Hath any of your souls ? What say you more ? 
IVhy lose I time in these things ? Talk of knowledge, 



196 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

It serves for inward use. I will not die 

Like to a clergyman, but like the captain 

That prayed on horseback, and, with sword in hand, 

Threatened the sun." 

Byron's Tragedy, 

JOHN. 

That is not unlike Byron ; but there is a finer and 
more untrammelled enthusiasm about it than he 
could rise to without effort. The melody of some 
verses in it is enchanting. What an airiness, as of 
the blue, unbounded sky, there is in that passage 
about the falcon ! One feels as if it could not have 
been spoken but on a lofty scaffold with only the 
arch of heaven overhead. The whole is very grand, 
but there is too much defiance in it. It is not so 
grand as would be the death of one who had learned, 
with Leigh Hunt, to know that 



" Patience and gentleness are power. 



)> 



The great spirit does not fling down the gauntlet to 
Death, but welcomes him as a brother-angel, who, 
knowing the way better, is to be his guide to his new 
working-place, and who, perchance, also led him 
hither from some dimmer sphere. *' The great good 
man," says Coleridge, has 

" three sure friends : 
Himself, his Maker, and the Angel Death J^'' 

PHILIP. 

You must remember, however, that Chapman's 
hero was a soldier. Let us read another death scene : 



CHAPMAN, ,197 

" Let my death 
Define life nothing but a courtier's breath ; 
Nothing is made of naught ; of all things made, 
The abstract is a dream but of a shade. \ 

I '11 not complain to. earth yet, but to heaven, 
And (like a man) look upward even in death. 
And if Vespasian thought in majesty 
An emperor might die standing, why not I ? 

( One offers to help khn.) 
Nay, without help, in which I will exceed him ; 
For he died splinted with his chambergrooms. 
Prop me, true sword, as thou hast ever done : 
The equal thought I bear of life and death 
Shall make fne faint on no side ; I am up 
Here like a Poman statue ; I will stand 

Till death have made me marble. ^^ 

UAmbois, 

JOHN. 

This is great, but it is the greatness of a heathen ; 
of one who would, no doubt, maintain an aristocracy 
in dying, and prefer the traditionary respectability of 
the axe to the degradation of the cross, and could 
not be decently choked out of existence but with a 
cord of silk. For there are those who would carry 
only the vanities and titles of life out of it with them, 
and would have a blazon of arms from the Herald's 
College buried with them (as the red men do arms 
of a more serviceable kind), to be a certificate of 
admission to the higher circles in the next world. 
How truly ludicrous, by the way, is this claim of 
subterranean precedence, this solicitude of epitaphs 
to be exact in giving their due titles to the deceased. 



198 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

as if the poor ghost were to lug about his tombstone 
as a visiting-card or a diploma ! And if this were 
the case, how contradictory would some of our titular 
dignitaries look (stripped, as they would be there, 
of all outward appliances), whose grandeur is deter- 
minable by parallels of latitude, and who, though 
'* Honorables " in their own state, may become quite 
^/j"-honorable by simply stepping across the border ! 
Would not the shade of a general, for instance, 
which should come staggering to the gate of immor- 
tality under the weight of marble renown piled over 
his ashes by a grateful country, with such letters of 
introduction as an epitaph detailing his numerous 
services would supply, be ranked side by side with 
that of a Pawnee brave, which should rush whooping 
in with its equally civilized recommendations in the 
shape of a string of scalps ? It is lucky that we are 
not taxed to believe the stories which epitaphs tell 
us, or we should be in despair of the world, thinking 
that all the good and great had gone out of it. But 
whither have I wandered in the grave-yard ? 

PHILIP. 

We have not got Chapman's hero thither yet. Let 
us hear the last : 

" O frail condition of strength, valor, virtue, 
In me (like warning-fire upon the top 
Of some steep beacon on a steeper hill) 
Made to express it ! like a falling star, 
Silently glanced, that, like a thunderbolt. 
Looked to have struck and shook the firmament ! " 



CHAPMAN. 



199 



We see that the *' equal thought '' which he imag- 
ined that he bore of life or death, in the moment of 
inspiring exultation at the idea of dying more imperi- 
ally than an emperor, breaks under him as the earth 
crumbles away beneath his feet. This must neces- 
sarily be the case with all greatness whose suste- 
nance is drawn from the things of this world. It is 
but a poor weed, which may grow up in that loose, 
rich soil, in a single night, to wilt and wither as 
soon. After all, the great secret is, to learn how 
little the world is while we are yet living in it. It is 
no hard lesson after we are removed from it, and it 
looks but like a grain of dim gold-dust in the infinite 
distance. Every day of our lives we jostle carelessly 
by a thousand human souls, each one of which is 
greater and more substantial than this tiny cockle- 
shell of a planet, in which we cruise so securely 
through the shoreless ocean of space, one larger rip- 
ple of which would sink it forever. And yet we build 
monuments, and scratch inscriptions upon its thin 
deck, and garner stores in its slender-ribbed hold, as 
for an eternal voyage ; and shout our nothings into 
the tired ear of the great Silence round about us, as 
if our jack-straw controversies were worth breaking 
its august slumber with. 

JOHN. 

A morality whose strict application would put an 
end to our conversations for the future. But I am 
not so easily silenced. To all men the moment of 
death is one of inspiration; a feeling of sublimity 



200 SECOND CONVERSATION. 

must enlarge the heart and deepen the utterance of 
the meanest, as earth swims away from under, and 
leaves him alone, on his new-born wings, in the great 
void infinite. It were harder, I imagine, to talk 
basely than nobly, w^hen the soul is waiting but for 
her green and callow pinions to toughen, and already 
forecasts her majestic flight. There are souls whose 
chrysalides* seem to have burst, and their wings to 
have expanded in this life, so that they can, at any 
time, lift themselves to that clear-aired point of van- 
tage to which death only raises the vulgar ; souls, 
whose flesh seems to have been given them but to 
make them capable of action while they are the min- 
isters of God's providence to their brothers upon 
earth. 

PHILIP. 

But Chapman does not seem to have been one of 
these 

" world's high-priests who do present 
The sacrifice for all," 

as George Herbert calls them. He was one of those 
impulsive natures, the fruit of whose age is nowise 
answerable to the abundant blossoming of their youth ; 
who expend, in a few dazzling flashes, that electricity 
which, if equally dispersed and circulated, might have 
made part of the world's healthful atmosphere. Such 
men must feel in dying that their lives have been in- 
complete, and must taste the overwhelming bitterness 
of knowing that inight have been can bear but a mo- 
ment's semblance of was^ from which it differs as 



CHAPMAN. ZQ\ 

much as the silent streak of a meteor from the perfect 
circling and fulfilment of a peaceful star. He knew 
not how, in the words of his brother dramatist, Ford, 

" to glorify his greatness with humility ; *' 

a plant which, lowly and despised of men, roots itself 
in eternity, and grows to be the lofty and unrivable 
trunk of secure self-sustainment ; while pride can 
never spring in any soil less gross than that of earth. 
Yet Chapman was cast in a huge mould ; there was 
stuff enough in him to have made some half a dozen 
modern poets, and the parings might have been 
kneaded into a novelist or two. 

JOHN. 

That is not like you. It is a mean and fugitive 
philosophy, that would hush its conscience by pre- 
tending to believe that only the scum and lees of 
time are left to us. Is not Wordsworth a modern 
poet? Put such a brain as Chapman's inside of 
Wordsworth's skull, and it would have as much room 
as a mouse in the cave of Kentucky ; it would be 
awed alike by the brooding silence and the gigantic 
whispers, and would creep into a dark corner to hide 
itself. Chapman's rude and angry hand would have 
shivered the thousand delicate strings of that won- 
drous lyre of Rydal, — so sensitive, that even the 
light fingers of the sunshine can make it tremble ; and 
which has a string to answer all sounds in nature, 
from the murmur of the breeze and the brook, up to 
the confused moan of humanity, with melody or pa- 
thos more ravishing than their own. No ; the strength 



202 SECOND CONVERSATION, 

of our old poets lay in their unconscious indepen- 
dence. Now, most volumes of poems have a clipped 
and suppressed look ; and if there be any freedom 
about them, it has a deprecatory and beseeching air, 
as if it would say, like one of our governor's proc- 
lamations, **with the advice and consent of the 
Council." Or, if they assume an independent bear- 
ing, there seems to be a consciousness and determin- 
ation about it, which robs it of its dignity, and 
degrades it into a swaggering strut. I dare not say 
that Wordsworth has not sometimes been guilty of 
this ; that he has not sometimes preferred an uncon- 
sciousness (if I may speak so contradictorily) of his 
own contriving, to that entire, unconditional sur- 
render of himself which the Muse demands. The 
oracular voices of the deep shun him who follows 
them for the mere sake of being the depositary and 
organ of their secrets ; as he pursues, they fly before 
him, and leave him to be deceived by mocking intel- 
ligences which he mistakes for theirs ; but they 
throng around him whose only prayer has been for a 
humble, self- forgetting heart ; him who has wrestled 
in tearful, mad agony with the deceitful pride of in- 
tellect, and attained at last to that serene height of 
humbleness whence all the kingdoms of this world 
may be seen and rejected, and which gives all the 
glory to God. My heart is sick when I behold the 
gallant vessels and rich-laden argosies which have 
left port with confident cheers and hopes of the mul- 
titude, to make shipwreck at last, and strew their 
wasted freight upon the bleak strand of Ambition ! 



CHAPMAN. 



203 



PHILIP. 

I believe you are right when you say that the fault 
of our modern poets lies in their want of indepen- 
dence and unconsciousness. But how can this be 
otherwise, when criticism has become so personal 
a matter? when the critic writes always as a friend 
or enemy, not of the book or its principles, but of 
the author? How can Poesy look or feel uncon- 
cerned, when Criticism is continually opening the 
door of her dressing-closet, or at least keeping her 
sedulous eye at the key-hole? But surely the mod- 
ern English dramatists are the least unconscious of 
mortals. They own certain qualities of mind among 
them in common, like stage properties. Their whole 
life as authors seems to consist in playing off a farce 
in which all the Elizabethan dramatists are person- 
ated in turn. Each selects his character, and is 
thereafter recognized by the rest only in that assumed 
garb. Mr. Jenkins has all the tenderness of Ford, 
Mr. Tomkins has more than the imagination of 
Webster, and Mr. Simpkins unites the fire of Marlow 
with the sound sense of Massinger. This is all very 
fine and affords the world matter for a laugh ; but it 
is quite idle for them to try to drive life into their 
dead forms by touching them to the bones of those 
old buried prophets. There are men among them 
who would write better plays than Ford or Massinger, 
if they could only forget for a day or two that Ford 
and Massinger ever lived. If Shakspeare had striven 
only to emulate ** Gorboduc," we should never have 



204 



SECOND CONVERSATION. 



heard of him. What free motion can we expect to 
see in a man who carries about with him, wherever 
he goes, a pair of funeral urns, one upon each arm? 
If I want an old dramatist I have only to turn to my 
shelves and invite myself to be of his company, 
sure of an honest welcome ; but I do not like to find 
him standing, scrimped up as small as possible in 
order to escape notice, behind the scenes in a mod- 
ern play, where I must stumble over his toes at every 
turn. There are characters in the British drama 
which seem to possess the longevity of the Wander- 
ing Jew, and the pertinacious vitality of the clown in 
a pantomime. After beholding them, not without 
secret satisfaction, killed in the massacre of the inno- 
cents at the end of one tragedy, they suddenly revive 
in the middle of another, looking as indifferent as 
if nothing special had happened ; and, to increase 
the wonder, they commonly appear, like the posthum- 
ous heroes of a wax collection, in the identical clothes 
they had on when they were murdered. Practice has 
made them perfect in this strange accomplishment ; 
they have died so often as to make nothing of it. I 
have asked my legal friends if some process might 
not be sued out to keep them dead ; but the weak 
point in the case seems to lie in the want of evidence 
of any contract on their part to that effect. Hermip- 
pus might have learned of them the cheapest method 
of prolonging life. Jones, who mimics the crowing 
of a cock so well, suspected a trick. From a certain 
tenuity in their discourse, he surmised that they were 
not really living characters, but only the ghosts of 



CHAPMAN-. 205 

such ; and accordingly, on an evening when he knew 
that one of them was to appear, stationed himself in 
the gallery, where zoological imitations and improv- 
isations are allowed, to try the effect of the ancient 
specific for putting such vermin to flight. As soon 
as the thing appeared upon the stage, our friend 
crowed, as he avers, with even more than his usual 
precision ; but it remained entirely unmoved, and was 
soon after run through the heart, to arise again, 
doubtless, at the next blast of the scene-shifter's 
whistle. Jones considers this as conclusive for the 
bodily-existence theory ; but without any impugn- 
ment of his extraordinary powers of imitation, it may 
be conjectured that the phenomenon (if a ghost) 
understood the hoax and despised it. I think a real 
chanticleer should be tried, as that would leave no 
reasonable doubt. 

JOHN. 

You have had a long chase after your butterfly. 
Have you nothing more to read me from Chapman ? 

PHILIP. 

I will only take leave of him in his own noble 
words : 

" Farewell, brave relics of a complete man ! 
Look up and see thy spirit made a star, 

. . and, when thou sett*st 
Thy radiant forehead in the firmament, 
Make the vast crystal crack with thy receipt ; 
Spread to a world of fire, and the aged sky 
Cheer with new sparks of old Humanity ! '* 



THIRD CONVERSATION. 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 



JOHN. . 

I HAVE always thought that our own history sup- 
plied many fine plots for tragedy. Hawthorne and 
Whittier have both drawn upon the persecutions of 
the early Quakers in New England for subjects. The 
Salem witch-mania would afford many striking situa- 
tions. Our good Pilgrim ancestors thought that 
religion could not see to pick her steps without light 
now and then from a bonfire of heretics. Perhaps 
our dramatists may find their account in it. King 
Philip, and Tecumseh, and Osceola would make 
good heroes ; so would the martyr Lovejoy. The 
institution of slavery, too, horrible as it is, miight 
give us some materials. But I suppose our refined 
democracy would not allow another Othello upon the 
stage. The rudeness of the age in which Shakspeare 
lived will excuse his want of delicacy ; but in an 
American, and in the ninteenth century, it would be 
atrocious not to believe in the aristocracy of the 
feelings. 

PHILIP. 

No doubt, our poets may find proper subjects 
without going out of their own geographical terri- 

206 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 207 

tories ; but I would not impricon them within those. 
What has poetry to do with space and time ? Past 
and future are to her but arcs of one horizon, whose 
centre is the living heart. Yet how much cant do 
we hear about a national literature ! Let a man 
make a Pequod or a Cherokee bemoan himself 
through some dozen or more stanzas in such a style 
as neither of them ever dreamed of; let him invent 
a new rhyme for Huron, or a new epithet for Niag- 
ara, and he has done something national. What 
have we to do with a dance of savages more than 
with one of dervishes, or that of the planets which 
Pythagoras fancied? Our notion of an Indian is 
about as true as that which the Europeans have of 
us. In all the situations which are proper to poetry 
one man will feel precisely like another ; and to the 
poet it is quite indifferent whether his scene be in 
Congo or Massachusetts, unless, indeed, he be not 
strong enough to walk firmly without the external 
support of old associations or magnificent ones. An 
Indian whose child dies mourns the loss of one who 
would have been a great brave and an expert hunter ; 
a tradesman in the same case laments that of a 
lineal successor behind the counter. Where is the 
difference in the feeling ? Yet in writing about the 
first, one would be bolstered up with rocks, woods, 
rivers, lakes, wigwams, scalping-parties, and the 
whole machinery of savage life, — things merely 
extraneous and cumbrous, and not at all belonein^ 
to the bare feeling one is trying to reproduce. It is 
merely because of our arbitrary and unnatural as- 



2o8 THIRD CONVERSATION. 

sociations with different callings or modes of life, — 
associations unworthy of men, much more, then, 
unworthy of poets, — that we esteem the savage more 
picturesque (or whatever you choose to call it) than 
the tradesman. In all the feelings with which Poesy 
concerns herself, the latter may be, and ought to be, 
superior. The savage has had, it is true, the limbs 
of the oak-tree for his cradle ; the primeval forest 
and the lonely prairie have been his playmates and 
nurses ; the sky, the waterfall, the thunder, the 
stars, the legends of his forefathers, these have been 
his letters and his poetry. But the other, if he has 
not been dandled by the forest-titan, has had the 
nobler tutelage of a mother's arms ; nature denies 
herself to him no more than to his savage brother ; 
the stars, and the forest, and the waterfall have their 
secrets for him as well ; and in books he can con- 
verse with yet higher company, the ever-living spirits 
of the brave and wise. Methinks the account be- 
tween the two is well balanced, or, if not, that the 
debit is on the side of him whom we idly call the 
child of nature, as if we dwellers in cities were but 
her foster-sons. A man is neither more nor less a 
poet because he chooses one subject or another. Did 
not the cast-away shell of a tortoise become Apollo's 
lute ? 

JOHN. 

Yes, but it was the shell of a large one ; a mud- 
turtle's would not have served his turn as well. Time 
and place are of no consequence to a poet ; but his 
eye should be as poetical in choosing a subject as 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 



209 



afterwards in detecting its nice relations and its 
happy aspects. He should avoid awakening a pre- 
disposed sense of the ludicrous in his readers. No 
man admires the *< Excursion " more than I ; to none 
has it given a truer comfort ; yet I never think of its 
hero as a pedler. Costume is not to be despised. 
Heroines, you know, according to Mr. Puff, cannot 
go safely mad but in white satin. 

PHILIP. 

We should only think of the pedler as a man, 
without regard to the petty accidents of outward cir- 
cumstances. The heart is the same in all ; else were 
the poet's power of enchantment gone forever. The 
soul is indifferent what garment she wears, or of 
what color and texture ; the true king is not unkinged 
by being discrowned. 

JOHN. 

Rather made more truly so. But Wordsworth's 
pedler, with the soul he had, would have been 
Wordsworth, and an act of parliament could not 
have made a pedler of him. As the pedler-element 
is not predominant in him, there was no necessity 
for making him one ; for it is exactly in proportion 
as any element of character is predominant that it is 
poetical. Shakspeare's Autolycus is a true pedler; 
yet his character is as ideal as that of Hamlet, only 
not in the same kind. The manufacturer's heart be- 
comes poetical when he looks upon Niagara as a 
mill-privilege. The whole drama of the factory, with 
the strange hum of its inanimate engines and the 



2IO THIRD CONVERSATION. 

stranger silence of its living ones, the unresting toil 
of its Titan wheels, that turn with gigantic sluggish- 
ness to their task in the gloomy prisons below, is 
acted over in his mind. The manufacturing nature 
in him is what makes him a poet, and it is in this 
light that he presents a poetic phase. Wordsworth's 
syllogism is logically defective. It does not follow 
because the poetical faculty or sense is independent 
of circumstances that a pedler must be a poet. It 
would be as reasonable to say that a poet must be a 
pedler. True, a pedler must be a poet to a certain 
degree ; every man must ; but it is only to the 
degree of having the poetic sense. When he pos- 
sesses ih.^ faculty, he will be pedler no longer. 

PHILIP. 

Perhaps you are right in an artistic point of view ; 
but I will not quarrel with my ambrosia because it 
comes to me in an earthen vessel ; its fragrance and 
its gift of immortalizing are the same as if it were 
sent in Jove's own beaker. It is possible that 
Wordsworth might have illustrated his noble theory 
more logically if he had made his hero rise out of his 
low estate to the higher one of a poet ; if, as Willis 
has exquisitely expressed it in one of his dramas, 
(perhaps the best in their kind since Fletcher), he 
had made him 

" By force of heart, 
And eagerness for light, grow tall and fair." 

But why need we consider the pedler in *' The 
Excursion " as anything more than the mouthpiece 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 21 1 

of Wordsworth himself ? He might, as you admit, 
have possessed the poetic sense as well, being a ped- 
ler, as in any other condition of life ; and Words- 
w^orth has only put himself in his place, and 
endowed his dumb images with his own poetic fac- 
ility of speech. The mind that flies high enough 
cannot see the pigmy distinctions which we make 
between different professions ; from a true elevation 
all look of equal height. Milton was a school-mas- 
ter, and might have been a cobbler, like Jacob 
Behmen, without derogation to his dignity. 

JOHN. 

Not till he had ceased to be Milton. Behmen 
mended shoes, and Bunyan soldered pans only so 
long as they were not yet waited upon by troops of 
winged visions. If Milton had stitched and patched 
as well as he built immortal rhyme, he would have 
deserved equal honor for his fidelity in that humbler 
duty ; but such honor had been husks and chaff to 
him, if he must meanwhile refuse to bear the heavenly 
message which had been intrusted to him. The 
lark rises from a lowly clod of earth, but he bears it 
not with him to the eaves of heaven. Whatever a 
man's inward calling is, that will have undivided 
possession of him, or no share at all in him. If a 
thought or wish stray from its entire fealty and sur- 
renderment to that divine presence in him, his vision 
of it becomes straightway clouded ; its oracles be- 
come indistinct to his ear ; and his utterance of them 
unintelligible, or but faint reminiscence instead of 



212 THIRD CONVERSATION. 

obedient and literal report. A virtue goes away from 
him whenever any other desire touches but the hem 
of his mantle. That alone must be the Egeria of the 
restless fountain of his heart, to which he turns, in 
solitude and silence, for wisdom and for console- 
men t. True it is that any worldly avocation that 
may further him in the service of this miraculous in- 
telligence, which has condescended to make him its 
slave, becomes not only tolerable, but holy. If 
Milton must get bread to keep the spirit in him till 
it have uttered itself, would not every poor crust, 
though earned by the meanest employment, have a 
flavor and fragrance of Eden in it ? 

" His humblest duties that hath clad with wings." 

If this Wordsworthian pedler had been the man 
his speech betrays him for, we should not have first 
heard of him from under the laurels of Rydal Mount. 
After once becoming aware of those strong wings of 
his, after once balancing himself upon them in the 
illimitable air of song, he would never have borne 
pack and measured tape again. As soon might you 
entice the butterfly back into his old hovel in the 
dingy grub after he had tasted all those nectarous 
delights which Spenser so lusciously describes in his 
** Muiopotmos." If he had looked on nature with a 
pedler's eye, the character would have been well 
enough ; but he was all poet. We have talked 
about this longer than was necessary. We do not 
agree, nor should we be pleasant companions if we 
did. This would be a dull world indeed, if all our 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 213 

opinions must bevel to one standard ; when all our 
hearts do, we shall see blue sky, and not sooner. 

PHILIP. 

A part, certainly, of what you have said jumps 
with my opinions precisely. It is true that every 
man has his infallible and inexorable monitor within 
— a conscience that forewarns, as well as one that 
reproves ; and it were hard to tell which wields the 
sharper lash. Nature throws the tools of v^hatever 
art she destines a select soul for invitingly in his way. 
The burnt stick from the hearth must be the pencil, 
and the wall the canvas, for the future painter. 
There must be a linkboy wanted at " the Globe," 
when the young Shakspeare runs away to London. 
Somehow or other there chances to be a clay-pit or 
a pottery near the birthplace of the young sculptor ; 
and wherever a poet or a musician is born, there 
will be an odd volume of Spenser, or a cracked 
spinnet, in the house. There is something more 
than a mere predisposition in the soul of a great 
genius (if, without offence, we may guess at these 
cryptic mysteries), which compels him into the path 
he must tread. If he deny and frustrate it, the whole 
face of nature looks at him sorrowfully and with a 
tender yet half-contemptuous reproach. He cannot 
cast away from him this badge of the friendship of 
the supernal powers ; if he try, it is brought back to 
him next day, like the ring of Polycrates. " Here 
stand I : I canjtot help it,'''' says stout Martin Luther, 
almost regretfully, exiled from his quiet convent-cell 



214 



THIRD COXVERSATION, 



by this superior will. Is not this the meaning of 
havmg a genius — an expression of a truth which 
has had all its sharp edges worn off and has become 
a mere phrase, in coming down to us from the sim- 
pler and more inseeing day when it was invented ? 
The supernatural calling carries a pain with it, too. 
The ancients were wont to say that he who saw a 
god must die. Perhaps this only meant that he who 
has gazed deepest into the vast mysteries of being, 
and held closest converse with the Eternal Love, is 
overpowered by the yearning and necessity to speak 
that which can never be wholly spoken, and which 
yet seems ever hovering in fiery words upon the 
tono^ue. The music of the mio^htv universe crowds 
through the slender reed, and shatters it with the 
very excess of quivering melody. 

JOHN. 

Certain it is that without this law of genius, which 
compels it to utter itself as it best may, very few 
great words had been spoken, or great deeds done. 
Everv' oT-eat man is more or less tino^ed with what the 
w^orld calls fanaticism. Fanaticism, in its ill sense, 
is that which makes a man blind to perceive the 
falseness of an error : the fanaticism of genius will not 
let him be persuaded that there is any lie in truth. 
The disbelief of the whole world cannot shake his 
faith that he is God's messenger, which upbears him 
as upon the Rock of Ages. He knows that the whole 
power of God is behind him, as the drop of water in 
the little creek feels that it is moved onward by the 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 215 

whole weight of the rising ocean. Unsupported by 
any of earth's customs or conventions, he learns to 
lean wholly on the Infinite. The seal of God's com- 
mission is set within, and has no ribbons about it to 
make it respectable in the eyes of the many. Most 
men are fearful of visitings from the other world, and 
set on by those whose interest lies mainly in this, 
they look with distrust, and often with ignorant hate, 
on him who converses with spirits. 

PHILIP. 

Yes, men always deny the messenger of God at 
first. The spiritual eye, like that of the body, un- 
til taught by experience, sees objects reversed, and 
makes that seemingly come from hell which has in 
truth but just descended, warm and fragrant, from 
the heart of God. But Time can never put Eternity 
off more than a day ; swift and strong comes the fair 
to-morrow, and with it that clearer perception of the 
beautiful, which sets another fixed star in the bright 
coronet of Truth. 

JOHN. 

But when the world is at last forced to believe the 
message, it despitefully entreats the bearer of it. In 
most cases men do not recognize him till the dis- 
guise of flesh has fallen off and the white wings of 
the angel are seen glancing in the full sunshine of 
that peace, back into whose welcoming bosom their 
flight is turned. If they recognize him earlier it is 
with a scurvy grace. Knowing that hunger is the 
best taskmaster for the body, and always using to 



21 6 THIRD CONVERSATION, 

measure spirit by the laws of matter, they conclude 
that it must be the sharpest spur for the soul also. 
They hold up a morsel of bread, as boys do to their 
dogs, and tell the prophet to speak for it. They 
know that he has a secret to tell them, and think 
they can starve it out of him, as if it were an evil 
demon. 

PHILIP. 

It is true enough that hunger is the best urger of 
the soul ; but it is the hunger, not of the body, but 
of the soul, which is love. A state of rest and 
quietude in the body is the most conformable to the 
happiness and serenity, and so to the undisturbed 
utterance, of the soul. Love, which is its appetite, 
quickens the soul of the seer, 

" And then, even of itself, it high doth climb ; 
What erst was dark becomes all eye, all sight^"* 

as Dr. More phrases it. The distracting cares and 
dunnings of want are not the best nurses of genius ; 
it has self-dependence enough without their prompt- 
ing. It may take other sorrows and thank God for 
them, for sorrow alone can unlock the dwelling of the 
deeper heavenly instincts ; but there is bitter enough 
in its cup, always, without the world's squeezing its 
spare drops of rue in. 

JOHN. 

Perhaps actual want may be inconsistent with that 
serenity of mind which is needful to the highest and 
noblest exercise of the creative power ; but I am 
not ready to allow that poverty is so. Few can 
dignify it like our so admirable prose-poet, whose 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 217 

tales are an honor even to the illustrious language 
they are written in ; few can draw such rich reve- 
nues of wise humbleness from it as our beloved 
R. C. ; few can win a smile from it by his Lambish 
humor, and that generous courtesy which trans- 
mutes his four-pence into a bank-note in the beg- 
gar's eyes, like S. ; but there is none for whom it 
has not some kind lesson. Poverty is a rare mis- 
tress for the poet. She alone can teach him what 
a cheap thing delight is ; to be had of every man, 
woman, and child he meets ; to be gathered from 
every tree, shrub, and flower ; nay, to be bought 
of the surly northwestern wind himself, by the 
easily-paid instalments of a cheerful, unhaggling 
spirit. Who knows the true taste of buns but the 
boy who receives the annual god-send of one with 
election-day? Who ever really went to the the- 
atre but Kit Nubbles ? Who feels what a fireside 
is but the little desolate, barefooted Ruths, who 
glean the broken laths and waste splinters after the 
carpenters have had a full harvest? Who believes 
that his cup is overflowing but he who has rarely 
seen anything but the dry bottom of it ? Poverty 
is the only seasoner of felicity. Except she be the 
cook, the bread is sour and heavy, and the joint 
tough or overdone. As brisk exercise is the cheap- 
est and warmest overcoat for the body, so is pov- 
erty for the heart. But it must be independent, and 
not of Panurge's mind, — that to owe is a heroic 
virtue. Debt is like an ingenious mechanical execu- 
tioner I have read of somewhere, which presented 



21 8 THIRD CONVERSATION, 

the image of a fair woman standing upon a pedestal 
of three steps. When the victim mounted the first, 
she opened her arms ; at the second, she began to 
close them slowly around him ; and at the third, 
she locked him in her iron embrace forever. On 
the other hand, however, poverty has its bad side. 
Poverty in one hour's time shall transport a man 
from the warm and fruitful climate of sworn broth- 
erhood with the world into the bare, bleak, desert, 
and polar ice-field of distant country-cousinship ; 
and the world's whole duty of man towards him be- 
comes on a sudden the necessity of staving off ask- 
ing him to dinner. Then, for the first time, he gets 
an insight into the efficacy of buttons, and discovers, 
to his great surprise, that the world has one at each 
pocket. This gives him an excellent hint for a 
sonnet to a button, comparing it to the dragon of 
the Hesperides, in which he gets no further than 
the end of the second quatrain, finding it impos- 
sible to think of anybody or anything analogous to 
Hercules in his victory over the monster. Besides, 
he now learns that there are no golden apples to be 
guarded, the world assuring him on its honor that 
it has enormous sums to pay and not a cent to 
meet them with. In a fit of inspired despair he 
writes an elegy, for the first two stanzas of which 
(for he has learned economy) he uses up the two 
quatrains already adjusted for his sonnet. By em- 
ploying the extremely simple process of deduction 
invented by the modern expounders of old myths, 
he finds that Hercules and ^vriq are identical, and 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 219 

that the same word in the Syro-Phoenician language 
imports a dragon and a button. The rest of the 
elegy is made easy by merely assuming the other 
steps of the proposition, as every expounder of old 
myths has a clear right to do, by a rule of logic 
founded on the usage of the best writers in that 
department. He therefore considers the heart in 
the poetical light of a pocket or garden of Hesper- 
ides, buttoned up tight against all intruders. As 
Scripture is always popular, he ends by comparing 
it also to that box which Jehoiada set at the gate of 
the temple, which had a hole in the top ample 
enough to admit the largest coins, though you 
might shake till you were tired without getting the 
smallest one out of it. Having now commenced 
author, we may as well leave him ; for, at that 
lowest ebb of fortune, the bare, muddy flats of 
poverty lie exposed, and the tide must soon turn 
again. 

PHILIP. 

That poverty may be of use to the poet, as you 
have said, may be granted, without allowing that it 
must come to the actual pinch and gripe of want 
with him . The man of genius surely needs it not as 
a spur, for his calling haunts him from childhood 
up. He knows that he has that to say that will make 
the great heart of the universe beat with a more 
joyous peacefulness and an evener motion. As he 
grows to man's estate, the sense of a duty imposed 
on him bv nature, and of a necessary obedience to 
heavenly messengers, which the world neither sees 



2 20 THIRD CONVERSATION. 

nor acknowledges, grows stronger and stronger. 
The exceeding brightness of his countenance weaves 
a crown around his head out of the thick air of 
earth; but earthhngs cannot see it. He tells his 
errand, and the world turns its hard face upon him, 
and says, " Thou art a drone in my busy hive ; why 
doest thou not something? '' Alas ! when the winter 
season comes, the world will find that he had been 
storing honey for it from heavenly flowers, for the 
famishing heart to feed upon. He must elbow 
through the dust and throng of the market, when 
he should be listening to the still, small voice of 
God ; he must blaspheme his high nature, and 
harden his heart to a touchstone to ring gold upon, 
when it is bursting with the unutterable agony of a 
heavenly errand neglected, — that bitterest feeling 
of having ''once had wings." The world has at 
last acknowledged his sovereignty, and crowned him 
with a crown of thorns. Thomson, in one of his 
letters, says : 

*' The great fat doctor of Bath told me that poets should 
be kept poor, the more to animate their genius. This is 
like the cruel custom of putting a bird's eye out, that it may 
sing the sweeter." 

The world plays the great fat doctor very well. 

JOHN. 

Mr. Putnam, in his late oration, made himself 
merry over l^e complainings of genius, and the com- 
fortable audience laughed pleasantly as he told genius 
to take its lazy hands out of its pockets and go to 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 221 

work. "Do the duty that lies nearest thee," said 
he, enlisting Goethe's brave word for the occasion, 
but forcing it to a new service. Nothing is so apt to 
lead men astray as their sense of the ludicrous ; no 
kindly feeling is so apt to make them say harsh 
things. To judge by the fine face of the orator, 
none would have been readier than he to have 
dropped a quiet drachma into the hat of the blind 
old Maeonides, or to have thought a song of his too 
ample payment for a week's lodging. It has not 
been the men of genius who have whined and whim- 
pered : it has been those who have mistaken their 
own vague longings and pitiful ambitions for the 
summonses of the true voice. Genius locks its 
sorrows in its own invincible heart ; from those awful 
deeps a moan may sometimes wander, but no com- 
plaint ; the voice may become sadder and the face 
more careworn, but that noble pity is not for itself; 
it is because of the adder-deafness which seals the 
ears of the world against the entrance of the eternal 
melodies of which it believes itself the instrument ; 
its lips are ever 

" As Cumse's cavern close, 
Its cheeks with fast and sorrow thin, 
Its rigid front almost morose, 
But for the patient hope within." ^ 

iFrom a fine poem "On the Bust of Dante" (its metre as 
severe, and its images as stern and sharp-cut, as the lines in the 
bust it commemorates), prefixed by T. W. Parsons, one of our 
most truly classic and delightful poets, to his translation of the 
first ten cantos of the " Inferno." It is to be hoped, for the 
honor of our literature, that the translator may be encouraged to 
proceed in his excellent undertaking. 



222 THIRD CONVERSATION. 



PHILIP. 

Mr. Putnam forgot that the duty which lies near- 
est a man of genius is to be a man of genius ; and it 
is a duty which no one else can perform for him. 
That is the first duty ; after that is well done, he may 
think of other subordinate ones. God did not lay it 
upon him that it might starve him or isolate him. 
Whatever idiosyncrasies he endows his creatures 
with, he intends them as the tools for them to earn 
their bread with. The same wings on which the 
bobolink hangs vibrating, rapturous with song, bear 
it also in search of the grub and the rice field ; the 
same structure which gives the swan his frigate-like 
majesty upon the water enables it also to pursue and 
secure its food. The world owes all created beings 
a living, not in return for any performance it has laid 
upon them, but for doing what they are intended and 
foreordained to do. The man of genius has an in- 
junction laid upon him to fulfil a certain destiny ; if 
he neglect it, bread will not quench his hunger nor 
water his thirst ; he is wholly cut off from the great 
catholic communion of nature ; if he obey it, there 
seems to be no such thing as starving him till it be 
accomplished. The poet will and must sing, in spite 
of want or any other misery ; but we know not how 
much sweeter and clearer his voice would have been 
but for these. The infinite beauty and harmony 
which he sees and hears force him to give vent to 
the glorious agony which swells his breast : 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 

" The sweetness hath his heart ypierced so, 
He cannot stint of singing by the way." 



223 



He has no choice in the matter ; the crown will 
find out David while he tends his flocks ; the javelin 
hurled at him will quiver harmless in the wall. There 
is such a thing as peculiarity of temperament, and 
you shall not find one of the thousand crafts in which 
men are employed but has one of its own. How 
came Mr. Putnam to be delivering that very oration? 

JOHN. 

I will propose to you another question equally easy 
of solution. How comes it that Italians have a 
patent-right to suffer by convulsions of nature ? Yet 
such is the fact. Let there be an eruption of Coto- 
paxi or Hecla, let the earth turn in its sleep and 
shake itself in the Society Islands, and in less than a 
week an Italian shall thrust into your hand a certif- 
icate, properly authenticated, that he has lost his all 
by one of them. How does it chance, also, that 
these true pensioners of nature (for they undoubtedly 
get a living that way, benevolence serving as a kind 
of insurance policy) have always large families of 
children? You speak of nature's providence in her 
endowment of the bobolink and the swan^ but what 
is it in comparison with the forethought she employs 
to the furnishment of these ? An eruption is a year's 
support to them ; an earthquake more destructive 
than common is a life annuity. Whenever she is 
about to touch a match to one of her underground 
magazines, she sets them down just over it ; she 



24 



THIRD CONVERSATION, 



saves them from the destructive wrath of the explo- 
sion, and then supplies them with some means of 
locomotion to the abodes of the charitable which 
transcends any swiftness of man's device. Before 
the news of the catastrophe, they are at our doors. 
This peculiar gift of that nation may perhaps be ye', 
turned to account in the forwarding of despatches. It 
is worth considering, at least. Again, how comes it to 
pass that none but destitute Irishmen are ever desirous 
of obtaining the means of reaching equally destitute 
wives and children at Halifax, and that they are some- 
times years in performing that desolate and pious pil- 
grimage, being inexplicably detained for months in 
any village where there are believing ears and gener- 
ous hearts? Some philosophers will have it that the 
tools of every animal and vegetable are the forced pro- 
ductions of self-preserving instinct ; that the grape- 
vine was set to climb the tree till its despair had escaped 
in prehensile tendrils, that the duck was tossed into 
the sea to drown till its fears had found a vent and a 
remedy in webbing its feet. Was it some such in- 
stinct which provided the emigrant Switzer with that 
natural excrescence of his tyrannous, indefatigable, 
tax-gathering barrel-organ ? 

PHILIP. 

I see that you are weary of our discussion. Let 
me put in two more pieces of evidence before the 
case goes to the jury. They are the depositions of 
Edmund Spenser and James Thomson. The first 
testifies to this effect : 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 225 

" O, what avails it of immortal seed 
To bin ybred, and never born to die ? 
Far better I it deem to die with speed, 
Than waste in woe and wailful misery ! " 

He gives the same testimony more at full in his 
** Mother Hubbard's Tale." Nor is the other less 
explicit : 

" To every labor its reward accrues, 
And they are sure of bread who swink and moil ; 

• • • • • 

But while the laws not guard that noblest toil, 
Ne for the Muses other meed decree. 
They praised are alone, and starve right merrily.'* 

JOHN. 
Now let us open Ford's ** Plays," which, I see, is 
the volume in your hand. 

PHILIP. 

Ford's dramatic abilities have, I think, been rated 
too highly. He has a great deal of tragic excitability 
and enthusiasm, and a good knowledge of stage- 
effect ; but these are the predominant qualities of 
his nature. In the strong mind they are always sub- 
servient. Ford can see the proprieties and beauties 
of a fine situation ; but he has not that dignity in 
him which can create them out of its own substance. 
His poetic faculty leans upon the tragic element in 
his stories for support, instead of being the founda- 
tion of it. Tender and graceful he always is, almost 
to excess ; never great and daring. He does not 



2 26 THIRD CONVERSATION. 

seem to me to deserve the high praise which, if I 
remember rightly, Lamb bestows upon him, and 
which other less judicious critics have repeated. 

JOHN. 

The sweet lovingness of Lamb's nature fitted him 
for a good critic ; but there were knotty quirks in 
the grain of his mind, which seemed, indeed, when 
polished by refined studies, little less than beauties, 
and which we cannot help loving, but which led him 
to the worship of strange gods, and with the more 
scrupulous punctuality that the mass were of another 
persuasion. No field is so small or so barren but 
there will be grazing enough in it to keep a hobby in 
excellent case. Lamb's love was of too rambling and 
wide-spreading a kind to be limited by the narrow 
trellises which satisfy a common nature. It stretched 
out its feelers and twined them around everything 
within its reach, clipping with its tender and delicate 
green the fair tree and the unsightly stump alike. 
Everything that he loved was, for the time, his ideal 
of loveliness. Even tobacco, when he was taking 
leave of it, became the very *' crown of perfumes," 
and he affirmed 

** Roses and violets but toys 
For the greener sort of boys 
Or for greener damsels meant." 

PHILIP. 

In this, and in the finer glimpses of his humor, 
and in the antique richness of his style in its best 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 227 

parts, he reminds me of Emerson ; but he had not 
the divine eye of our American poet, nor his deep 
transparency and majestic simpleness of language, 
full of images that seem like remembrance-flowers 
dropped from between the pages of Bacon, or Mon- 
taigne, or Browne, or Herbert ; reminding us of all 
felicitous seasons in our own lives, and yet infused 
with a congenial virtue from the magic leaves be- 
tween which they had been stored. John Ford, 
though he cannot rank with the first order of minds, 
yet claims an instinctive deference, as one of that 
glorious brotherhood who so illustrated and digni- 
fied our English tongue at the beginning of the 
seventeenth century. Set beside almost any of our 
modern dramatists, there is certainly something grand 
and free about him ; and though he has not that 
*' large utterance" which belonged to Shakspeare, 
and perhaps one or two others of his contempo- 
raries, he sometimes rises into a fiery earnestness 
which falls little short of sublimity, and proves that 
he had in him, as Drayton said of Marlow, 

" Those brave translunary things, 
That our first poets had." 

It is this abandoned earnestness and willingness 
and simplicity which so much elevate the writers of 
that age above nearly all succeeding ones. In their 
companionship, a certain pardoning and compromis- 
ing restraint, which hampers us in the society of less 
unconscious writers, seems to be thrown off the mind. 
Here, at last, we find frankness ; contempt of con- 



2 28 THIRD CONVERSATION. 

sequences ; dignity that finds graceful sustenance in 
the smallest and most ordinary events of to-day, as 
well as in the greatest, or in prophecies of a nobler 
to-morrow. They laid the deep-set bases of their 
works and thoughts in the cheap but eternal rock of 
nature, not idly writing their names upon the shifting 
and unstable sands of a taste or a prejudice, to be 
washed out by the next wave, or blurred and over- 
drifted by the first stronger breeze. Pegasus is the 
most unsafe of hobby-horses. The poet whose pen 
is governed by any self-built theory (even if he per- 
suade men to believe in it) will be read only so long 
as that theorv is not driven out by another. 

JOHN. 

Yet a creed or theory may sometimes be of good 
service in the cause of truth. They concentrate the 
will and energy of a strong mind upon one point, 
and so lead to the discovery of such facts as inter- 
sect that point in their revolutions ; as the wells of 
the old astronomers, by shutting out all light from 
around, enabled them to see the else invisible stars. 

PHILIP. 

But the credit should rather be given to the con- 
centrated resolution than to the creed or theory. 
Resolution is the youngest and dearest daughter of 
Destiny, and may win from her fond mother almost 
any favor she chooses to ask, though in very wanton- 
ness. The great spirits of that day were of no 
school, except that in which their own soul was 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 229 

mistress. The door to the temple of any creed was 
too low to admit men of their godlike stature without 
stooping, and that they could not do. They scorned 
those effeminate conventionalities which half a 
century later decked our ruddy English Muse in 
the last Paris modes, bound up and powdered her 
free golden hair, and so pinched her robust waist 
that she has scarce borne a healthy child since. 
Poesy, with them, was not an artifice in the easy 
reach of any whose ear could detect the jingle of two 
words, and who had arithmetic enough to count as 
high as ten on their finger-ends. They believed 
that Poesy demanded the enthralling and ennobling 
toil of a whole life, the heart, soul, will, life, every- 
thing, of those who professed her service. They 
esteemed her the most homelike and gentle of spirits, 
and would not suffer her to travel abroad to bring 
home licentiousness veiled under a greater precision 
of manner, at the expense of all freedom and grace. 
The innocent artlessness of her face looked sweetest 
to them in the warm firelight upon the hearth of 
home. They knew that all the outward forms of 
poetry are changeable as those of a cloud. These 
fall away like the petals of a flower, but they leave 
the soul, the plain, sober seed-vessel which most men 
pass by unregarded. Parnassus is now shrunk to a 
modern mountain ; Hippocrene has dwindled to a 
scant rill, which the feet of a single ox can make 
muddy through its whole course ; but while the heart 
remains the poet's fountain bubbles up as clear and 
fresh as ever. 



230 



THIRD CONVERSATION, 



JOHN. 

Only that part of a form which is founded in nature 
can survive ; the worth of the statue of Memnon as 
an oracle died with the wise priest who spoke through 
it ; but after three thousand years it still recognizes 
its ancient god, and grows musical under the golden 
fingers of sunrise. I confess I can hardly shake off 
the influence of early education in favor of the French 
school of poets. I admire the others with a kind of 
reverence, as grand, natural, unpruned spirits ; but I 
find my entertainment, too, in these, as in the society 
of elegant gentlemen with whom artificiality has been 
carried well-nigh to the unconscious ease of nature. 
Dryden — 

PHILIP. 

But I will not grant him for one of them. He 
could not smother his sturdy English spirit. His 
Gallicism is ridiculous, as in his plays. It is not 
ingrained. I will give you an example of what 
English-French must be, by quoting a specimen of 
French-English. Here is a French translation of 
Gray's Odes, published at Paris, in the sixth year 
of the Republic. 

JOHN. 

Without allowing it to be an argument, I can con- 
ceive that it must be a great curiosity. Let me hear 
some of it. 

PHILIP. 

You will not be disappointed. It is in prose and 
the translator avows that his sole object has been to 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 



231 



be literally exact. Fidelity first, then elegance, is 
his motto ; but you will see that he has not forgotten 
the lessons of the posture-master. He tells us in his 
preface that he undertook the enterprise, 

'* autant pour faciliter rintelligence de la langue Anglaise, 
que pour faire connoitre en France un digne rival d^ Ossian^ 
de Dryden^ et de Milton. Exactitude rigoureuse a la 
lettre et au sens, voila la systeme qu'on a cru devoir 
adopter. Mais en s'attachant a rendre litteralement les 
pensees, les expressions, les images, et les figures de I'auteur 
Anglais, on n'en a pas moins senti la necessite d'ecrire avec 
purete, elegance, et precision." 

In the first Ode, the line. 

** Disclose the long-expecting flowers," 
is rendered, 

" EUes ouvrent le bouton des fleurs impatientes." 

" Some show their gayly-gilded trim. 
Quick glancing in the sun," 

" D'autres dans leurs jeux vifs et legers, font-etinceler au 
soleil I'or de leur legante parure,^'' 

In the *' Ode on a Distant View of Eton College," 
** Father Thames" is translated '* fleuve paternel ;''^ 
and the lines, 

" This racks the joints, this fires the veins, 
That every laboring sinew strains," 

are thus given : 



232 



THIRD CONVERSATION. 



" L'une torture les articulations, I'autre allume le sang; 
celles-ci tiraille douloureusement to us les nerfs." 

In the fourth Ode, 

** Stern, rugged nurse ! thy rigid lore, 
With patience many a year she bore," 

is rendered, 

** Austere et rude institutrice, c'est sous ta discipline 
severe qu'elle apprit a exercer sa "^dXx^nz^ pendant nombre 
d^anneesP 

In the fifth Ode, 

" To brisk notes in cadence beating. 
Glance their many-twinkling feet," 

^^ Rapides comme le clin-d^ceil, leur pieds brillans re- 
pondent en cadence a la vivacite des airs; " 

" With arms sublime that float upon the air, 
In gliding state she wins her easy way," 

" Les bras eleves et flottans dans les airs, elle s^avance 
avec une noble aisance et glisse Ugeremeiit vers la terre ; " 

" She deigns to hear the savage youth repeat 
In loose numbers, wildly sweet," 

" Elle ne dedaigne pas d'ecouter les metres incorrects 
des jeunes sauvages qui chantent en refrains grossierement 
cadences ; " 

" Yet shall he mount and keep his distant way 

Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate. 
Beneath the good how far — but far above the great," 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 



233 



" Cependant il s'elevera, et il a marque sa place a une 
grande distance des bornes d'un destin vulgaire, trop peut- 
etre au-dessous des bons poHes^ mais bien au-dessus des 
grands ! " 

I have spared you the trial of the Scandinavian 
odes, but hardly think you will desire more. Those 
from which I have quoted are the most French of 
Gray's Odes. I only wish the translator had at- 
tempted them in verse. 

JOHN. 

At the worst it is a pleasure to have one's old as- 
sociations revived by the line or two here and there 
which you have quoted from the original poems. 
The annotators may convince us that Gray never 
used a thought, image, or word, of his own, in all his 
verses ; we should like him still as a delicate worker 
in mosaic, and skip all the accusatory notes at the 
bottom of the page. So much originality is there 
always in grace ! Gray is the Barrington of poets ; 
but who shall get him convicted and transported? 
And what place is good enough to be a Botany Bay 
for him? Nihil surripicit quod non ornavit. 

PHILIP. 

Gray came when the British Muse was in a deli- 
quiuin / and, while she was lying as if in articulo 
mortis, the critics rushed in and took possession of 
the house as sole legatees. They locked up every- 
thing and put their seals upon it ; nothing must be 



234 



THIRD CONVERSATION, 



used without a written order from them ; not a meal 
must be served up except it be a hash of yesterday's 
leavings. Things must take a new turn now ; they 
had no notion of seeing their soon-to-be-sainted 
kinswoman's substance wasted as it had been, es- 
pecially when one Shakspeare was major-domo ; 
they would soon have order among the servants in 
the house, or somebody would smart for it ; every- 
thing had been too long at sixes and sevens. But, 
in the midst of their predacious technicalities, in 
stalks the undoubted eldest son, not a very polished 
personage, and with hands hardened by coarse fam- 
iliarity with Mossgiel ploughtails, but the true heir 
nevertheless. He slaps the powdered wigs of the 
technical gentlemen in their eyes, and they vanish, 
like Aubrey's ghost, *' with a melodious twang," vow- 
ing to take the law of him. It was a great mercy 
that he did not serve them as Ulysses did the wait- 
ing-maids. 

JOHN. 

To open a volume of Burns, after diluting the 
mind with the stale insipidities of the mob of rhymers 
who preceded him, reminds me of a rural. adventure I 
had last summer. Skirting, in one of my walks, a 
rocky upland which hemmed in the low salt-marsh I 
had been plashing over, I came, at a sudden turning, 
upon a clump of wild red lilies, that burned fiercely 
in a kind of natural fireplace, shaped out for them 
by an inward bend of the rock. How they seemed 
to usurp to themselves all the blazing July sunshine 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 23; 

to comfort their tropical hearts withal ! How cheap 
and colorless looked the little bunch of blossomed 
weeds I had been gathering with so much care ! 
How that one prodigal clump seemed to have drunk 
suddenly dry the whole overrunning beaker of sum- 
mer to keep their fiery madness at its height ! 

PHILIP. 

The poets had been afraid that the light of the 
natural sun would put their fires out, and kept the 
shutters fast barred accordingly. Burns, with one 
lusty spurn of his foot, got rid of all the old clumsy 
machinery. Men began to fall in love with being 
natural, and to grow unaffected to the extreme point 
of affectation. But there is such a thing as being 
too natural ; we must remember that it was with 
a twig of green mistletoe that Baldur, the Scandina- 
vian Apollo, was slain. Delighted to see Burns 
whistling and singing after his plough, and wearing 
his clouted shoon into the Edinburgh drawing-rooms, 
some ingenious gentlemen, resolved to possess them- 
selves of his secret, whistled and sang louder than 
he, wore thicker soles, and dragged a plough after 
them wherever they went. The old poets lived in 
too sincere an age and were too truly independent 
to think independence a virtue. To try to be inde- 
pendent is to acknowledge our slavery. It was not 
from ignorance of rules and unities that the old 
dramatists committed anachronisms, made islands 
of countries set in the heart of continents, and put 
English oaths into the mouths of Roman mobs ; they 



236 THIRD CONVERSATION. . 

broke through such critical cobwebs, for they were 
never spun to catch eagles in. The laws of poetry, 
as they are called, are only deductions drawn by 
certain mathematical minds from the works of estab- 
lished authors ; let a new genius come, and these are 
incompetent to measure him. There is a most deli- 
cate, yet most unbending conscience in the heart 
of every true poet, from whose approval or rejection 
of all pre-established laws he feels that there is no 
appeal. If he prefer the verdict of the world to that 
of this instinctive voice, it is all over with him ; 
thenceforth he is but an echo, and his immortality 
as frail as that. What cared our old dramatists for 
Aristotle's poetics? They laid their scenes in the 
unchangeable heart of man, and so, like Donne's 

fancy, 

" Made one little room an everywhere." 

They scorned to bow the knee to any authority whose 
feet were of clay. They knew that he who strives 
to keep an act of fealty to slavery secret defies his 
own consciousness. Some strange providence always 
makes it public and open as the prostration of King 
Ottocar. The homage that a man does in his secret- 
est soul is visible to all time ; there will be a cringe 
and stoop in his shoulders in spite of him. The gall- 
ing mark of the fetter will never out ; men read it in 
every line he writes, hear it in every word he speaks, 
and see it in every look he looks. Though he be no 
longer the slave of a coward deference to the opinion 
of the many, merely because they are the many, he 
is still the bondman of Memory, who can make him 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 237 

crouch at her bidding. You may think that the 
writers of that day had no daws to peck at them ; 
but hear the admired Sir John Harrington, who, in 
his *' Apology for Poesy," says : 

" We live in such a time in which nothing can escape 
the envious tooth and backbiting tongue of an impure 
mouth ; and wherein every corner hath a squint-eyed 
Zoilus that can look aright on no man's doings." 

Even King James, whose authorship was most likely 
as secure from such rubs as any, prefixes this quota- 
tion to his ' ' Rules for Scottish Verse " : 

" To ignorants obdurde, where wilful error lies, 
Nor yet to carping folks, whose malice may deject thee, 
Nor to such folks as think them only wise, 
I But to the docile bairns of knowledge I direct thee." 

I have quoted these royal rhymes from memory, and 
may not have done them full justice ; but I am sure 
I have given them with enough exactness. 

But a subject on which I love to talk has led me 
astray; let us return to Ford. His dramatic power 
consists mainly in the choice of his plots. His char- 
acters, as is often the case with those of retired 
students, are rather certain turns of mind or eccen- 
tricities put into a body, than real men and women. 

JOHN. 

He does not carry matters quite so far as some 

ater writers who go to the expense of a whole 

human frame for the mere sake of bringing a single 

humorous phrase upon the stage, the sole use of the 



238 THIRD CONVERSATION, 

legs being to carry about the body, that of the body 
to sustain the head, and that of the head to utter the 
said humorous phrase at proper intervals. Friar 
Bacon's head, or one of those '* airy tongues" which 
Milton borrowed of Marco Polo, would save these 
gentry a great waste of flesh and bone, if it could be 
induced to go upon the stage. 

PHILIP. 

No ; Ford is not quite so spendthrift in human 
beings as that. Guardians should be appointed for 
such authors, as for those who cannot take care of 
their estates. His plots raise him and carry him 
along with them whither they please, and it is gen- 
erally only at their culminating points that he shows 
much strength ; and then it is the strength of pas- 
sion, not of reason. Indeed, I do not know but it 
should rather be called weakness. He puts his 
characters in situations where the heart that has a 
drop of hot blood in it finds it easier to be strong 
than weak. His heroes show that fitful stren«:th 
which grows out of intense excitement rather than 
healthy muscular action ; it does not rise with the 
difiiculty or danger they are in, and, looking down 
on it, assert calmly the unusurpable sovereignty of 
the soul, even after the flesh is overcome, but springs 
forward in an exulting gush of glorious despair to 
grapple with death and fate. In a truly noble bravery 
of soul, the interest is wholly the fruit of immortality ; 
here it is the Sodom-apple of mortality. In the 
one case, we exult to see the infinite overshadow 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 



239 



and dwarf the finite ; in the other, we cannot restrain, 
a kind of romantic enthusiasm and admiration at see- 
ing the weak clay so gallantly defy the overwhelming 
power which it well knows must crush it. High 
genius may be fiery and impetuous, but it can never 
bully and look big ; it does not defy death and 
futurity ; for a doubt of its monarchy over them 
never overflushed its serene countenance. 

JOHN. 

Shakspeare's characters seem to modify his plots 
as much as they are modified by them in turn. This 
may be the result of his unapproachable art ; for art 
in him is but the tracing of nature to her primordial 
laws ; is but nature precipitated, as it were, by the 
infallible test of philosophy. In his plays, as in life, 
there is a perpetual seesaw of character and circum- 
stance, now one uppermost, now the other. Nature 
is never afraid to reason in a circle ; we must let her 
assume her premises, and make our deductions 
logical accordingly. The actors in Shakspeare's 
dramas are only overcome by so much as they fall 
below their ideal, and are wanting in some attribute 
of true manhood. Wherever we go with him, the 
absence of a virtue always suggests its presence ; the 
want of any nobleness makes us feel its beauty the 
more keenly. 

PHILIP. 

But Ford's heroes are strong only in their imper- 
fections, and it is to these that whatever admiration 



240 



THIRD CONVERSATION, 



we yield them is paid. They interest us only so far 
as they can make us forget our quiet, calm ideal. 
This is, the very stamp of weakness. We should be 
surprised if we saw them show any natural greatness. 
They are morbid and unhealthy; for, in truth, what 
we call greatness and nobleness is but entire health ; 
to those only who are denaturalized themselves does 
it seem wonderful ; to the natural man they are as 
customary and unconscious as the beating of his 
heart, or the motion of his lungs, and as necessary. 
Therefore it is that praise always surprises and hum- 
bles true genius ; the shadow of earth comes then 
between them and their starry ideal with a cold and 
dark eclipse. In Ford's characters, the sublimity, if 
there be any, is that of a defiant despair. 

JOHN. 

The great genius may fail, but it is never thus. 
In him the spirit often overbalances the body, and 
sets its ideal too far beyond the actual. Unable to 
reach that, he seems to do less than many a one of 
less power ; for the performance of any thing lower 
than what he has marked out for himself carries with 
it a feeling almost of degradation, that dispirits him. 
His wings may be too weak to bear him to that in- 
finite height ; but if he fail, he is an angel still, and 
falls not so low as the proudest pitch of talent. His 
failures are successful compared with the successes of 
others. But not to himself do they seem so ; though, 
at his earth-dwindling height, he show like a star to 
the eyes of the world, what is it to him while he be- 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 241 

holds the golden gates of his aspiration, above him 
still, fast shut and barred immitigably ? Yet high 
genius has that in it which makes that its longings 
can never wholly be fruitless ; its utmost imperfec- 
tion has some touch of the perfect in it. 

PHILIP. ^ 

The slavery of the character to the incident in 
Ford's plays has often reminded me of that story of 
the travellers, who lost their way in the mummy-pits, 
and who were all forced to pass through the same 
narrow orifice, which gave ready way to the slender 
but through which the stout were obliged to wriggle 
and squeeze with a desperate forgetfulness of bulk. 
It may be foolish for a philosopher, but it is wisdom 
in a dramatist, to follow the example of nature, who 
always takes care to make large holes for her large 
cats, and small holes for her small ones. Ford, 
perhaps, more than any of his contemporaries 
deserves the name of sentmieittal. He has not the 
stately gravity and antique majesty of Chapman, the 
wild imagination or even the tenderness of Webster, 
the precise sense of Jonson, the homeliness of Hey- 
wood, nor the delicate apprehension and silver 
tongue of Fletcher, but he has more sentiment than 
all of them put together. The names of his plays 
show the bent of his mind: *' Love's Sacrifice," 
*' The Lover's Melancholy," and *« The Broken 
Heart," are the names of three of the best ; and 
there is another in which the doctrine of the 
elective affinities is laid down broadly enough to 



242 



THIRD CONVERSATION. 



have shocked even Goethe. His personal appear- 
ance seems to have answered well enough to what I 
have surmised of his character. A contemporary 
thus graphically describes him : 

" Deep in a dump John Ford was alone gat, 
With folded arms and melancholy hatJ^"* 

A couplet which brings up the central figure on the 
title-page to the old edition of the '* Anatomy of 
Melancholy" very vividly before our eyes. His 
dependence on things out of himself is shown also in 
his historical play of '' Perkin Warbeck," in which, 
having no very exciting plot to sustain him, he is 
very gentlemanly and very dull. He does not fur- 
nish so many isolated passages which are complete 
• in themselves, a quality remarkable in the old drama- 
tists, among whom only Shakspeare united perfectness 
of the parts with strict adaptation and harmony of the 
whole. A play of Shakspeare's seems like one of 
those basaltic palaces whose roof is supported by in- 
numerable pillars, each formed of many crystals per- 
fect in themselves. To give you a fair idea of Ford, 
I will give a sketch of the plot of his most famous 
tragedy, with a few extracts. 

The plot of ** The Broken Heart" is simply this : 
Ithocles, the favorite of Amyclas, king of Laconia, 
instigated by an ancient feud with Orgilus, the 
betrothed of his sister Penthea, has forced her to 
break the match and marry Bassanes. Orgilus, full 
of an intent to revenge himself at the first chance, 
pretends a reconcilement with Ithocles, who, mean- 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 



243 



while, has repented of the wrong he had done, and 
moreover loves and is beloved by Calantha, the king's 
daiighter. Penthea dies mad. Orgilus murders 
Ithocles on the eve of his marriage with Calantha, 
who dies of a broken heart, after naming Nearchus, 
a former suitor, her successor to the throne. The 
following scene has great purity and beauty, and 
withal much sentimentalism in it. Orgilus, in the 
disguise of a scholar (a disguise as common now as 
then), has gained speech of Penthea. I read only 
the last part of the scene : 

" Org. All pleasures are but mere imagination, 
Feeding the hungry appetite with steam, 
And sight of banquet, whilst the body pines, 
Not relishing the real taste of food : 
Such is the leanness of a heart, divided 
From intercourse of troth-contracted loves ; 
No horror should deface that precious figure 
Sealed with the lively stamp of equal souls. 

" Pen, Away ! some fury hath bewitched thy tongue : 
The breath of ignorance that flies from thence 
Ripens a knowledge in me of afflictions. 
Above all sufferance . — Thing of talk, begone, 
Begone, without reply ! 

" Org, Be just, Penthea, 
In thy commands ; when thou send'st forth a doom 
Of banishment, know first on whom it lights. 
Thus I take off the shroud, in which my cares 
Are folded up from view of common eyes. 

[ Throws off his scholar's dress. 
What is thy sentence next ? 

** Pen, Rash man ! thou lay'st 
A blemish on mine honor, with the hazard 



244 



THIRD CONVERSATION, 



Of thy too desperate life ; yet I profess, 
By all the laws of ceremonious wedlock, 
I have not given admittance to one thought 
Of female change, since crueltv' enforced 
Divorce betwixt my body and my heart 
Why would you fall from goodness thus ? 

" Org, O, rather 
Examine me, how I could live to say 
I have been much, much wronged. 'T is for thy sake 
I put on this imposture ; dear Penthea, 
If thy soft bosom be not turned to marble, 
Thou 'It pity our calamities ; my interest 
Confirms me, thou art mine still. 

" Pen. Lend your hand ; 
With both of mine I clasp it thus, thus kiss it. 
Thus kneel before ye. 

[Penthea kneels, 

" Org. You instruct my duty. 

[Orgilus kneels. 

" Pen. We may stand up. [ They rise.'\ Have you 
aught else to urge 
Of new demand ? as for the old, forget it ; 
'T is buried in an everlasting silence, 
And shall be, shall be ever : what more would you? 

*' Org, I would possess my w^ife; the equity 
Of very reason bids me. 

''Pen. Is that all? 

" Org. Why, 't is the all of me, myself. 

" Pen. Remove 
Your steps some distance from me; at this pace 
A few words I dare change ; but first put on 
Your borrowed shape. 

" Org. You are obeyed; 't is done. 

\_^He resumes his disguise. 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 245 

" Pen. How, Orgilus, by promise, I was thine, 
The heavens do witness ; they can witness, too, 
A rape done on mj truth : how I do love thee 
Yet, Orgilus, and yet, must best appear 
In tendering thy freedom ; for I find 
The constant preservation of thy merit, 
By thy not daring to attempt my fame 
With injury of any loose conceit. 
Which might give deeper wounds to discontents. 
Continue this fair race; then, though I cannot 
Add to thy comfort, yet I shall more often 
Remember from what fortune I am fallen. 
And pity mine own ruin. Live, live happy, 
Happy in thy next choice, that thou may'st people 
This barren age with virtues in thy issue ! 
And, O, when thou art married, think on me 
With mercy, not contempt ; I hope thy wife. 
Hearing my story, will not scorn my fall. — 
Now let us part. 

" Org. Part ! yet advise thee better : 
Penthea is the wife to Orgilus, 
And ever shall be. 

** Pen. Never shall, nor will. 

" Org. How ! 

" Pen. Hear me ; in a word I '11 tell thee why, 
The virgin-dowry which my birth bestowed. 
Is ravished by another ; my true love 
Abhors to think, that Orgilus deserved 
No better favors than a second bed. 

" Org. I must not take this reason. 

" Pen. To confirm it; 
Should I outlive my bondage, let me meet 
Another worse than this, and less desired, 
If, of all men alive, thou shouldst but touch 



246 THIRD CONVERSATION, 

My lip or hand again ! 

" Org. Penthea, now 
I tell you, you grow wanton in my sufferance; 
Come, sweet, thou art mine. 

" Pe7i. Uncivil Sir, forbear. 
Or I can turn affection into vengeance; 
Your reputation, if you value any. 
Lies bleeding at my feet. Unworthy man. 
If ever henceforth thou appear in language, 
Message, or letter, to betray my frailty, 
I'll call thy former protestations lust, 
And curse my stars for forfeit of my judgment. 
Go thou, fit only for disguise, and walks. 
To hide thy shame; this once I spare thy life. 
I laugh at mine own confidence ; my sorrows 
By thee are made inferior to my fortunes : 
If ever thou didst harbour worthy love. 
Dare not to answer. My good genius guide me, 
That I may never see thee more ! — Go from me ! 

" Org, I'll tear my veil of politic French off, 
And stand up like a man resolved to do : — 
Action, not words, shall show me. — O Penthea ! 

\^Exit. 

" Pen, He sighed my name sure, as he parted from 
me ; 
I fear I was too rough. Alas, poor gentleman ! 
He looked not like the ruins of his youth, 
But like the ruins of those ruins. Honor, 
How much we fight with weakness to preserve thee ! 

' [ Walks aside.'''* 

To my mind, Penthea's last speech is the best part 
of the scene. In the first part she shoves an appar- 
ently Roman virtue, but there seems to be a savor of 



f 

THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 247 

prudery, and a suspicion of its own strength in it, 
which a truly courageous honor and chastity would be 
the last to entertain. 

None of our dramatists but Shakspeare have been 
able to paint madness. Most of their attempts that 
way are failures ; they grow silly and mopingly senti- 
mental ; they utter a great deal of such stuff as 
nobody in his senses would utter, and as nobody out 
of them could have the ingenious leisure to invent. 
Here is a specimen of Ford's mania : 

" Pen, Sure, if we were all sirens, we should sing 

pitifully, 
And 't were a comely music, when in parts 
One sung another's knell ; the turde sighs 
When he hath lost his mate ; and yet some say 
He must be dead first : 't is a fine deceit 
To pass away in a dream ! indeed, I 've slept 
With mine eyes open a great while. No falsehood 
Equals a broken faith; there 's not a hair 
Sticks on my head but, like a leaden plummet. 
It sinks me to the grave; I must creep thither; 
The journey is not long. 

• •••••• 

" Pen. Spare your hand ; 
Believe me, I '11 not hurt it. 

" Org, My heart too. 

" Pen. Complain not though I wring it hard : I '11 
kiss it ; 
O, 't is a fine, soft palm ! — hark, in thine ear ; 
Like whom do I look, prithee? — nay, no whispering. 
Goodness ! we had been happy; too much happiness 
Will make folk proud, they say — but that is he — 

\_PoinHng to Ithocles. 



I 

248 THIRD CONVERSATION. 

And yet he paid for 't home ; alas ! his heart 

Is crept into the cabinet of the princess ; 

We shall have points and bride-laces. Remember, 

When we last gathered roses in the garden, 

I found my wits ; but truly you lost yours. 

That's he, and still 'tis he. 

\_Again pointing to Ithocles." 

Now let us turn to the catastrophe. Calantha, 
after settling the succession of the kingdom, turn's 
to the body of Ithocles. 

" Cal. Forgive me : — now I turn to thee, thou 
shadow 
Of my contracted lord ! Bear witness all, 
I put my mother's wedding-ring upon 
His finger; 't was my father's last bequest. 

\_Places a ring on the finger ^Ithocles. 
Thus I new-marry him, whose wife I am ; 
Death shall not separate us. O my Lords, 
I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture. 
When one news straight came huddling on another. 
Of death ! and death ! and death ! still I danced forward ; 
But it struck home, and here, and in an instant. 
Be such mere women, who, with shrieks and outcries, 
Can vow a present end to all their sorrows. 
Yet live to [court] new pleasures, and outhve them : 
They are the silent griefs which cut the heart-strings ; 
Let me die smiling. 

" Near, 'T is a truth too ominous. 

*' Cal. One kiss on these cold lips, my last ! — \^Kisses 

Ithocles.] — crack, crack — 
Argos now 's Sparta's king. Command the voices 
Which wait at th' altar now to sing the song 
I fitted for my end." 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS, 249 

Lamb speaks of this death-scene as ** carrying us 
back to Calvary and the cross ^' (or uses words to 
that effect), but this, it seems to me, is attributing 
too much importance to the mere physical fact of 
dying. 

JOHN. 

What one dies for, not his dying, glorifies him. 
The comparison is an irreverent one, as that must 
need be which matches a selfish love with a universal. 
Love's nobility is shown in this, that it strengthens 
us to make sacrifices for others, and not for the 
object of our love alone. All the good we do is a 
service done to that, but that is not the sole recipient. 
Our love for one is only, therefore, made preeminent 
that it may show us the beauty and holiness of that 
love whose arms are wide enough for all. It is easy 
enough to die for one we love so fiercely ; but it is a 
harder and nobler martyrdom to live for others. 
Love is only then perfected, when it can bear to out- 
last the body, which was but its outward expression, 
and a prop for its infant steps, and can feel its union 
with the beloved spirit in a mild serenity, and an 
inward prompting to a thousand little unrewarded 
acts of every-day brotherhood. The love of one is a 
mean, not an end. 

PHILIP. 

Another objection which I should feel inclined to 
bring against this scene is that the breaking of 
Calantha's heart seems to be made too palpable and 
anatomical an event. It is too much like the mere 



250 THIRD CONVERSATION, 

bursting of a blood-vessel, which Smith or Brown 
might accomplish, though wholly incapable of rend- 
ering themselves tragically available by the breaking 
of their hearts. It is like that stanza of the old 
ballad, 

" She turned her back unto the wall, 
And her face unto the rock ; 
And there, before her ??iother^s eyes. 
Her very heart it broke,'^ 

In the ballad, however, there is more propriety ; 
the heroine's heart gives way suddenly, under a sud- 
den blow. But Calantha saves up her heartbreak, as 
it were, until it can come in with proper effect at the 
end of the tragedy. 

Ford sometimes reminds one of the picturesque 
luxuriance of Fletcher. The following exquisite 
passage is very like Fletcher, and is a good speci- 
men of Ford's lighter powers. When we read it 
we almost wish he had writen masques or pasto- 
rals rather than plays. The story is an old one, 
and was translated by Crashawe in a poem which 
for exquisite rhythm and diction can hardly be par- 
alleled in the language. Ford brings it in in his 
* * Lover's Melancholy " : 

" One morning early 
This accident encountered me : I heard 
The sweetest and most ravishing contention 
That art and nature ever were at strife in. 
A sound of music touched mine ears, or rather, 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 



251 



Indeed, entranced my soul : as I stole nearer, 
Invited by the melody, I saw 
This youth, this fair-faced youth, upon his lute. 
With strains of strange variety and harmony, 
Proclaiming, as it seemed, so bold a challenge 
To the clear choristers of the woods, the birds, 
That, as they flocked about him, all stood silent. 
Wondering at what they heard : I wondered too. 

,. . A nightingale 

Nature's best-skilled musician, undertakes 
The challenge, and, for every several strain 
The well-shaped youth could touch, she sang her own ; 
He could not run division with more art 
Upon his quaking instrument, than she, 
The nightingale, did with her various notes 
Reply to ; for a voice and for a sound, 
Amethus, 't is much easier to believe 
That such they were, than hope to hear again. 
Some time thus spent, the young man grew at last 
Into a pretty anger, that a bird. 
Whom art had never taught clefs, moods, and notes, 
Should vie with him for mastery, whose study 
Had busied many hours to perfect practice : 
To end the controversy, in a rapture 
Upon his instrument he plays so swiftly, 
So many voluntaries and so quick, 
That there was curiosity and cunning. 
Concord and discord, lines of differing method 
Meeting in one full centre of delight. 

The bird, ordained to be 
Music's first martyr, strove to imitate 
These several sounds ; which, when her warbling throat 
Failed in, for grief, down dropped she on his lute 
And brake her heart ! " 



252 THIRD CONVERSATION. 

I must give you a short passage from Crashawe's 
poem, which I cannot help thinking the best music 
in words I ever read. Crashawe was himself an 
exquisite musician. After the lutanist has played a 
strain, the nightingale answers : 

** She measures every measure, everywhere 
Meets art with art; sometimes, as if in doubt 
Not perfect yet, and fearing to be out, 
Wails her plain ditty in one long-spun note. 
Through the sleek passage of her open throat, 
A clear, unwrinkled song ; then doth she point it 
With tender accents, and severely joint it 
By short diminutives, that, being reared^ 
In controverting warbles evenly shared, 
With her sweet self she wrangles. 

• • • • 

" Her supple breast thrills out 
Sharp airs, and staggers iit a warbling doubt 
Of dallying sweetness, hovers o^er her skill, 
And folds in waved notes, with a trembling bill. 
The pliant series of her slippery song : 
Then starts she suddenly into a throng 
Of short, thick sobs, ..... 
That roll themselves over her lubric throat 
In panting murmurs 'stilled out of her breast, 
That ever-bubbling spring, the sugared nest 
Of her delicious soul, that there doth lie, 
Bathing in streams of liquid melody; 
Music's best seed-plot, when in ripened airs 
A golden-headed harvest fairly rears 
Its honey-dropping tops, ploughed by her breath." 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 253 

JOHN. 

May we neither of us ever hear a nightingale ! — 
No, I recall so rash a prayer ; but, after this, we 
should surely thinlc his music harsh. Even the ex- 
travagant metaphor with which your extract ended is 
forced upon us as natural and easy by the foregoing 
enthusiasm. 

PHILIP. 

Now that the nightingale has enticed us out of 
doors, you will like to hear Ford's praise of Spring. 
Raybright asks Spring : 

" What dowry can you bring me? 
" Spring. Dowry ? 
Is 't come to this ! ain I held poor and base? 
A girdle make whose buckles, stretched their length, 
Shall reach from the Arctic to the Antarctic pole; 
What ground soe'er thou canst with that inclose 
I'll give thee freely : Not a lark that calls 
The iJioming up shall build on any turf 
But she shall be thy tenant, call thee lord^ 
And for his rent pay thee in change of songs" 

The Sun's Darling. 
And again : 

" O my dear love, the spring, I 'm cheated of thee ! 
Thou hadst a body, the four elements 
Dwelt never in a fairer; a mind princely; 
Thy language, like thy singers, musical. 
How cool wast thou in anger ! In thy diet 
How temperate and yet sumptuous ! thou ''dst not waste 
The weight of a sad violet in excess^ 



254 THIRD CONVERSATION. 

Yet still thy board had dishes numberless ; 
Dumb beasts, even, loved thee ; once a young lark 
Sat on thy hand and, gazing on thine eyes, 
Mounted and sang, thinking them moving skies." 

Ibid. 

Now I will gather you a handful of flowers from 
the rest of the plays and close the volume. Here is 
a pretty illustration of the doctrine of sympathies : 

" The constant loadstone and the steel are found 
In several mines ; yet there is such a league 
Between these minerals, as if one vein 
Of earth had nourished both. The gentle myrtle 
Is not engraft upon the olive's stock ; 
Yet nature hath between them locked a secret 
Of sympathy that, being planted near, 
They will, both in their branches and their roots. 
Embrace each other ; twines of ivy round 
The well-grown oak ; the vine doth court the elm ; 
Yet these are different plants. " 

The lover'' s Melancholy. 

The end of a wasted life is thus touchingly set 
forth : 

" Minutes are numbered by the fall of sands, 

Ashy an hour-glass ; the span of time 

Doth waste us to our graves, and we look on it : 

An age of pleasures revelled out, comes home 

At last and ends in sorrow ; but the life, 

Weary of riot, numbers every sand, 

Wailing in sighs until the last drop down 

So to conclude calamity in rest." 

Ibid, 



THE OLD DRAMATISTS. 255 

JOHN. 

The rhythm of these lines is finely managed ; there 
is a sadness and weariness in the flow of the verse 
which sinks gradually into the quiet of the exquis- 
itely-modulated last line. 

PHILIP. 

I will read a few more fragments without remark. 

** Busy opinion is an idle fool, 
That, as a school-rod keeps a child in awe, 
Frights the inexperienced temper of the mind." 

Ibid. 

" Let upstarts exercise unmanly roughness ; 
Clear spirits to the humble will be humble.^"* 

Lady^s Trial. 

*' The sweetest freedom is an honest hearth 

Ibid, 

You will relish this itemed account of a poor man's 
revenues : 

" What lands soe'er the world's surveyor, the sun. 
Can measure in a day, I dare call mine ; 
All kingdoms I have right to ; I am free 
Of every country ; in the four elements 
I have as deep share as an emperor ; 
All beasts which the earth bears are to serve me, 
All birds to sing to me ; and can you catch me 
With a tempting golden apple? " 

The Sun's Darling. 



256 THIRD CONVERSATION. 

This thought is noble : 

" He cannot fear 
Who builds on noble grounds ; sickness or pain 
Is the deserver's exercise." 

The Broken Heart, 

And, with this good speech on his lips, John Ford 
makes his exit from the stage of our little private 
theatre. 

JOHN. 

I have spent a pleasant evening ; and if I do not 
yet admire your old favorites as much as you do, it 
is because I do not know them so well. It has been 
my happy experience in life to find some lovable 
quality in every human being I have known, and to 
find more with more knowledge ; may it be so with 
the Old Dramatists ! 



THE END. 



Au^ 



fc? 



JUL ^-^ 190i 



I 



